If you’ve ever had the need to write a series of posts, then you know what a pain it can be trying to organize them and get them connected in a logical and obvious way. The first goal, of course, is to make it so that any reader coming across any post in the series would first know that this post was but one in a series. The second goal is to help them easily navigate to the other posts.
The Organize Series plugin will help you do all that. In fact, it doesn’t just “help” you do it, it does practically everything for you automatically.
After activating the plugin, there are only two simple steps you need to take to get your posts into a well laid out series:
- Create a new series as you would a category
- Assign your posts to your series as you would to a category
1. Create a New Series
After installation, create a title for your new series. Posts > Manage Series
There you will see a set up page like a category set up page. Create your new series by simply giving it a name as you would a category. Once you have posts in your series, you will also be able to easily access and organize them from this page as well.
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2. Assign Post to a Series
On the right-hand side of your post/edit page, you should now see an option to assign your post to a series. There is also an option to order the post in the series by giving it a “Series Part” number.
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The Result
And that’s it. Your series of posts will now be hooked together, and navigational elements will automatically be added to each post in the series.
Clicking on the name of series takes you to an automatically generated table of contents for all the posts in the series. This page is created by the plugin and resides at mysite.com/series/series-title/. So as you can see, the new taxonomy “series” has been automatically created.
Unlike so many plugins (too many), the Organize Series plugin is well documented on its WordPress Plugin Directory page. You can check it out there.
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There is a few excellent add-ons for Organize Series as well, including ‘Organize Series Publisher’ that helps manage post series – so you can bulk publish a whole series, etc as well:
http://organizeseries.com/download/
Thanks, Mike.
What it seems to offer is what I was looking for but the problem for me with this plugin is that it has a bug or conflict on the site I wanted to use it and the author won’t even discuss it unless you pay for his support. So if you get stuck, and it won’t even load, you only have two options. Pay for his support or use something else.
It such a great effort. I think the series title should be included in the page that mention part 1, part 2 and part 3.
Thanks Joseph for the great writeup on Organize Series!
No problem. Very nice plugin.
Does anyone have any tips for modifying the plugin to work with custom post types? I was able to modify everything aside from “Part 1 of ##” I cant get ## to recognize what the total number of posts are for the series in the custom post type. Everything else seems to work. Anyone have any suggestions? :)
Christine – You might ask the plugin developer. Or you can ask this question in the WP forums, and he may see it. Go to the plugin page, and then if you’re logged in, at the very bottom of the right-hand column you will see a link that says, “Got something to say? Need help? Write a new topic.” Many plugin developers monitor questions about their plugins on the WP forums.