In the last post, I talked about how you can show off the latest series in your sidebar.  One of the caveats of the latest_series() function/widget is that it only shows one series.  The “latest series” function is just a way of giving readers quick insight into the most recent series you’ve published to your blog and is the easiest to customize.

However, there is another more powerful function included with Organize Series that you can use to output a list of all the series you’ve written where you want that acts very similar to the “wp_list_categories()” template tag in the WordPress core. What that means is that if you’ve already got a handle on how to use “wp-list_categories” then you’ll have no problem with “wp_list_series()”.  Let’s take a closer look:

The Widget

For those of you who are uncomfortable with editing your theme files and who are using a theme with widgets enabled there is a widget included with Organize Series that you can use to output the list of series in your sidebar.

Some more fixes to the code made it necessary for yet another release of Organize Series.  Incidentally - I noticed that Travis Snoozy made the announcement that he is no longer actively developing his “In-Series” plugin and will only be maintaining it until he can find someone to take over it’s development.  Working on Organize Series has made me painfully aware of just how much time and effort goes into developing these plugins and his work on In-Series certainly “prodded” my development of my own series plugin in some areas.  Thanks for your contributions to the WordPress community Travis!

Without further ado, here’s the changeset for version 2.0.7 of Organize Series (you can download this version by clicking here):

Minor Changes:

• Removal of extraneous html from series.php and seriestoc.php template files.
• Updated readme.txt for suggestion to copy customized series.php and seriestoc.php files to theme directory.
• Added missing < /div > to seriestoc.php file to fix “98%” of the typical default installations of this plugin.
• fixed a potential bug with the get_series_toc() function/template tag.
• Fixed a few spacing, code structure errors throughout the files.
• Changed the “title” attribute for the get_series_toc() link to something a bit more friendly.

Yet another catchup post for my Organize Series plugin. The current version of the plugin is 2.0.6 and you can download it via this link. Here’s the changesets:

2.0.6 - Fixes a pretty major bug with the custom rewrite/permalink structure for series archives. This bug only shows up if you use certain prefixes to your custom permalinks such as /archives/...rest of permalink. Hat tip to Edward for the catch and fix.

2.0.5 - Contains the following bug fixes:

• PHP error that was reported on the Manage Series page affecting certain installs.
• .rss validation warning for series archive feeds thanks to this post
• some typo fixes with readme.txt file
• updating readme.txt to reflect that Organize Series works with WordPress 2.5.1

One of the things that the Organize Series WordPress plugin does well is provide multiple ways for you to promote and “show off” the various series you’ve written. Since some of those possibilities aren’t easily visible to the new user this next few posts in the series will give you a list of all the different ways you can publicize your serial work.

Latest Series - <?php latest_series(); ?>

This template tag is one of the few features of Organize Series that is not automatically enabled right out of the box on fresh Organize Series installs. However, it is a powerful function that provides an easy way for you to promote the latest series you’ve published (or are in the midst of writing).

How to use it:

To use the latest_series() tag you need to be familiar with editing your theme files. There are some great pointers for this here, here, and here. The latest_series() template tag can be placed wherever you want - inside or outside of the WordPress loop. What will happen is that when the page is generated the latest_series template tag will be replaced by what you have included in the Latest Series Template in the Series Options Page. So you can control the output via the series options. By default, the latest_series tag will display the series icon for the latest series.

We’re going to conclude our look at the Series Options page in this post by looking at the “Latest Series” Template and the Series Icon Options.

Here’s what the “Latest Series Template” option field looks like (WP2.5):

This is the one template option that is not automatically added to your blog. The contents of this template control the output of the latest_series() function or the latest series widget. You can insert the latest_series() function wherever you want it to appear in your blog (manually into your theme files) or you can simply use the built in widget if you have widgets enabled for your theme.

This is how the default Latest Series output looks on my blog (to the left):

Of course like the other template options on the series options page you can use different tokens to control the contents of the latest_series() ouput.  For instance you might want to use the %series_title% token to display the series title instead of the series icon.  In future versions of Organize Series I’ll be adding more tokens that you can use.