Organize Series Plugin for WordPress

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.

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.