It’s been a little over two months since the last blog post and the team has been hard at work on the next version, version 3.7. However as you can probably guess, besides continued development on the program, there have been quite a few other changes that have been made with the biggest being the new name.
Starting With Version 3.7, JMM Will Now be Known as Shoko.
Over the past couple months, starting around mid-development of Version 3.6 we started talking about a possible name change to give the program a unique identity. While you could argue that Japanese Media Manager is a unique identity, it lead to some confusion on what exactly our program did and did not do. The common misconception we noted was that because of the name, users assumed JMM supported other types of Japanese media such as Manga and/or J-Drama which was never the original intended goal. In fact, the original name of the program was Anime Media Manager but was only changed to Japanese Media Manager when one of the original staff members wanted to include support for manga. Due to personal circumstances, that staff member was never able to add support for it.
The staff suggested dozens of names and many arguments for and against these suggestions were made. There were also multiple times when the staff did agree on a new name only to find out that name was already taken or being used by another anime-related site. Shoko, which had been previously suggested by da3dsoul was brought up again and while Shoko.com was taken, ShokoAnime.com was not. Shoko is the Japanese word for Archive which we all agreed describes the program pretty accurately as we archive our collection. We’ve also changed our tagline to reflect our new name, Your Archive, Your Way. Since our initial beginning as a Media Portal plugin, we’ve seen tremendous growth over the years and now offer support for multiple programs and plugins allowing our users to view and watch their anime collection however they’d like.
While our primary domain for now is still https://jmediamanager.org, we suggest updating your bookmarks to our new domain name https://ShokoAnime.com as we’ll be making it the primary domain name very soon. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be making all the public changes, the underlying code will however not bechanging at this time as that alone is a time consuming process.
Our New Look
As you can see, we’ve updated the look and design of our website.
While most of the changes are either behind the scenes or things you probably won’t notice, there have been noticeable changes. Each program and plugin now has it’s own landing page complete with information, screenshots and relevant links for users. This was done to address one of the main complaints we received regarding the difficulty in finding certain information on the website. We’re also completely mobile friendly and tablet friendlynow which should please users viewing our site on those devices. We’re still in the process of updating the documentation and various other parts of the website to reflect the new name so no need to report pages that still say JMM, unless the page in question also says Shoko.
Please let us know what you think in the Website Development channel on Discord, we’re still making adjustments.
Shoko Verson 3.7 Beta Available
After a long and extensive alpha period, we’re happy to release Version 3.7 beta for everyone to try!
While not as jam packed as Version 3.6, there have been a lot of additions, changes, fixes and even some removals in Version 3.7. Please note, that the wording in Server and Desktop has not been updated yet so it will still say JMM instead of Shoko.
As normal we’ll cover the big ones below but we suggest taking a look at the redesigned changelog page for all the changes.
Cloud Support
Shoko now supports cloud hosting!
Cloud support is the main feature of Version 3.7 and allows Users to add an Amazon, Google Drive or One Drive account, map some import folders and use it for hosting their anime collection. Please read the updated Configuring Shoko Server page for instructions on how to do this.
Web UI Included
Version 3.7 includes support for our Web UI which we recommend everyone to check out as it will be replacing the standard Shoko Server UI in the future.
You can access the Web UI by typing in localhost:8111 in your browser after Shoko Server has finished loading. We’re asking our users to play around with it and report back any issues or suggestion you might have in the Web UI Repository on GitHub.
Administrative Privileges no Longer Needed
Both Shoko Server and Shoko Desktop will now store your settings and files in the ProgramData folder removing the need for administrative privileges when running either programs. You will need to run both Shoko Server and Shoko Desktop as an Administrator once to perform the migration if you’ve previously used Shoko, which the majority of you have.
Shoko Server Integrity Check
Users can now run an integrity check comparing their files current hash to the one stored in the database from when the file was initially hashed. Using this utility, you’ll be able to identify corrupt files and replace them.