Organize Series Plugin for WordPress

Web Design & Development

I just installed the Organize Series plugin for this site. Right out of the box it comes with everything needed to organize related blog posts into a “series” of posts with a specific order. I’ve seen this on a lot of other WordPress sites when people do a series of articles about a specific topic. Some of my blog posts are rather long, and I’ve been wanting to post more frequently, so I think this will help because I can link several short posts together into a series rather than spend several days writing a single long post.

I retroactively organized my console emulator posts into a series. They were written specifically as a series, but at the time I didn’t have the means to link them together other than adding a “part 1, part 2, etc.” to the title of each post. Now if you view any one of the posts, you’ll see a message at the top of the post indicating that it is part of a series. The end of the post also includes links to the other posts in the series.

Table of contents for the Installing and Using Console Emulators series
The Organize Series plugin displays a table of contents for the series at the end of each post in the series. With a little CSS I was able to make it fit right in with my theme!

The plugin includes its own CSS for styling the messages and table of contents, but I decided to integrate it more tightly with my “Glass” theme. Fortunately the Organize Series plugin provides a lot of flexibility in modifying the markup of the messages and table of contents. I was able to include my own HTML5 markup and CSS hooks for the plugin. Now it generates an <aside> element for the list of posts in the series and a <nav> element to move forward and backward in the series that I styled to match my overall theme.

Take a look at the link above and let me know what you think; I think it turned out pretty good! When I have more time I’ll probably ditch the auto-generated series information and insert the template tags directly into my theme so I have some more control over how it’s rendered. For now, however, the plugin does a great job with the OOTB options.


Comments

Comments are closed