I’ve never liked our Review Index. As a card-carrying Checklist Hound, I assure you it just didn’t pass muster. It needed to be better organized, to hold more information, and not be a nightmare to update. After three years, I’ve finally got a review checklist I can appreciate (& easily update!).

While the old checklist was a giant html file full of tables and lists, the new Review Index comes about thank to the WP-Tables Reloaded plugin. If you’ve been around the site, you’ve seen this plugin in-action on the sortable checklist indexes or the MOTU Bios page. I’ve wanted to get the Review Index into that same format for awhile, but we’ve reviewed so many figures over the last three years (last week featured the review of our 800th figure!) that reorganizing them from the html file into a format the plugin can use has been a herculean task.

But that’s all boring back story, here’s how the new Index works. For ease of use, the list loads in reverse chronological order. That means the most recent reviews will always be at the top and you’ll be able to tell when it was last updated. The plan is to refresh it every few weeks, so if you’re looking for something newer that’s not on there, it should be easily found on the first few pages of the main site.

The new page is also a searchable / sortable index. Any column can be used to sort the list alphabetically either by character name, toy line, manufacturer, or author. There is one glitch which I’m still working on. If IAT has a checklist for a particular line, we added a link in the toy line column. Unfortunately, that confuses the plugin a tad and currently toy lines with links are alphabetizing seperately from toy lines without. Until that’s resolved, you can still alphabetize by toyline, but you’ll have to scroll through the linked toy lines and non-linked toy lines seperately (so close!)

Also, by typing the name of a toy line or figure into the search box at the top, you can reduce the index to just the entries that feature the keyword entered. To reset the checklist after the search, simply delete the search term or reload the page.

That should be all you need to know. It’ll be there when you need it.