A proper plugin for flipping pages of a book or booklet (list of 8 tested and reviewed plugins)


Here is the list of the plugins that I tested:

Those booklet plugins that actually are useful

WP Booklet – super-simple and easy to work with, has a post type and a shortcode, a short list of options and that’s it. Oh, and it loads images upon opening the page from the booklet, instead of loading all of the at the beginning. It could work with PDF, if pdfinfo was present on my server.

This is the best free plugin from wordpress.org/plugins that I could find and test, creating a decent responsive booklet “slider”. Or do some call it flipbook?

Here are some others that could do the trick:

Digital Publications by Supsystic – looks pretty good, has loads of options and is close to being responsive as a final result. Admin interface is rather messy, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to setup a booklet from a set of pictures or pages (custom HTML and CSS are also useful here, but not required).

Photo Book Gallery – loads the booklet pretty slowly, probably because it loads all images prior to displaying anything from it. Apart from this it has tons of options and a Pro version. Out of the box, the booklet, represented by a set of photos and a set of display options, doesn’t seem to be responsive, but is still better than most of the other plugins out there and can definitely be used in a production environment after some fiddling with the settings. Most probably could be used by people ignorant of the power of CSS.

WP jQuery Pager – a very basic solution that allows you to flip images, listed by ID in a shortcode. Navigation buttons are present, but nothing more. Some styling would be needed, as this thing is definitely not responsive, but hey, for a 5 year-old plugin it’s cool that it works at all!

Worthless, useless or bad booklet plugins

Interactive 3D FlipBook – a demo plugin undercover. Already reported to the Plugin team in WordPress.org for distributing a crippled version of a premium plugin (sold in CodeCanyon). While working with the UI of the plugin is pretty easy, it limits your booklet to 10 pages only, and if you leave it open for some time, it will hog your CPU heavily. Well done, Ivan, for being an douche by abusing at least two rules for publishing a plugin in the Directory and giving 5-star reviews to your plugin from at least 3 accounts.

[livebooklet] and [simplebooklet] -both of these do not work, if they ever did. Using the shortcode leads to forced PDF download. In the markup you could see an iframe of the PDF, so they never actually did anything more than just embedding a PDF in the page.

Easy Page Flip – has some basic options for the booklet which is presented as a custom post type, which requires a gallery to be embedded in it. Not responsive and rather ugly, so you’ll need to fix all that with (tons of) extra CSS.

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