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I developed the “Organize Series WordPress plugin” to help me manage and make it easier for readers to find various articles I’ve written as part of a series. In this series of articles I am writing about how to use this plugin effectively and in the process I’ll be working through various features of the plugin.


A bit late with this post today but at least I still got it out the door!

If you haven’t yet you’ll want to read about automation settings, tokens, and Templates before reading any further – it’ll save me repeating myself ;)

One of the new features added with Organize Series 2.0 is a Navigation strip that gets displayed with posts that are part of a series containing links to the next and previous posts in the series. This just provides another way for users to click through to other posts in the series besides the series table of contents.

On the Series Options page is a template for controlling how the series navigation strip is displayed:

series post navigation template

The output of the above looks like this:

series navigation strip example

Notice that like the other templates on the options page you control the output by inserting various %tokens%, text, and (x)html markup. Once again, you can automatically insert the series navigation strip into your blog by using the %postcontent% token. In this particular example the %postcontent% token is before the rest of the template telling the plugin that you want the Series Navigation Strip to show up after the post-content. If you don’t want the series navigation strip inserted automatically then simply remove %postcontent% from the template. UPDATE (JULY 23, 2009 – thanks steve!): Actually, removing the %postcontent% token would keep your post content from displaying.  What you would want to do is remove everything else BUT the %postcontent% token.  Sorry for the confusion!

Another caveat of %postcontent% is that it only controls automatic insertion into the full post page views of your blog theme (on is_single() pages).

The default tokens %previous_post% and %next_post% are replaced by the title of the previous and next posts in the series respectively. However if you’d rather use something other than the post titles (maybe to keep the text from overflowing when there are long titles like in my example) that’s what the %previous_post_custom% and %next_post_custom% tokens are for. Insert those in your series navigation template and then choose what text you want to show up in the “Custom next post navigation text” and “Custom previous post navigation text” fields.

What about template tags? Ahh yes, for the customizers here’s the goods (don’t forget more detail docs are in the series-template-tags.php file and I’ll also be writing an article(s) later in this series):

wp_series_nav() – gets the links for previous OR next posts in a series. This function takes the arguments: series_ID, whether your calling the next post or previous post, whether you want custom text or not and whether you want the output displayed. This comes in handy for people who want to put the `next post` and `previous post` links in totally different locations on the page.

wp_assemble_series_nav() – this basically calls the series navigation template and replaces all the %tokens% with the related series information. Note if you use this AND also have the %postcontent% token in the series navigation template you’ll have some weird stuff happen…

Well, I’m starting to approach the end of the series options page. I’m interested in knowing what folks would like me to focus on in this series once I’ve exhausted that stuff. Buzz me with a comment to this post and I’ll take off from there!