So far in the Organize Series Usage Tips Series I’ve been writing about the Series Options page and focusing on some of the things you can do there to customize the output of series related information on your blog. In this post of the series I’m going to focus on the customization of the Series Table of Contents Template.

The Series Table of Contents is a page on your blog that lists all the series you’ve written (that contain posts). The output of this page is controlled by three things.

• “Series Table of Contents URL” in the Automation Settings Section of the Series Options Page. This setting is what you want to be the location of the series table of contents page.
• “seriestoc.php” - this is the default file that Organize Series will load when the series table of contents page is requested. The default layout in this file should work with most theme setups but of course it won’t work with all. In some cases, this file will have to be modified to match your theme structure (i.e by looking at your themes index.php or archive.php file). I’ll be writing a post later in this series to go into more detail with this.

Once again, if you haven’t yet, you should read about automation settings, tokens, and Templates before reading any further.

In this post I’m going to zero in on the Series Meta. What is the series meta? It’s basically an information strip you can associate with a post that belongs to a series for a quick overview of what part the post is, a total count of the posts in the series, and the name of the series the post belongs to. Of course what you actually put in the series meta is up to you!

Here’s what the template looks like:

And here’s the output on the blog:

Now in the case of the series-meta, it appears wherever the post that is a part of a series is displayed and the location of the output is controlled once again by the %postcontent% token.

If you want to manually insert the series-meta template into your theme then you need to remove the %postcontent% token AND make sure the Display series meta information with posts? checkbox is unchecked.

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:

The output of the above looks like this:

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.

The Series Post List Template is used to affect the presentation of all posts belonging to a series on the single page of a post belonging to a series. In other words, this –>

By default, Organize Series inserts the contents of this template into your blog whenever a post page is displayed for a post that belongs to a series. However you can disable this by unchecking the “Display list of series on post pages” checkbox (I know, I need to change the wording - it’s misleading!).

Let’s take a look at a screenshot of the Series Post List template:

In every template you include the following three things:

• (x)html/css controlling the layout and “looks” of the box.
• Any text you want displayed.
• %token-tags% controlling the placement of series information (see “Series Options Page: Tokens” for more on tokens)

In this particular template we see that I’ve used div containers to control the layout of the postlist “box” (with css class “seriesbox” and “center”). I’ve also decided to make the list of posts (%post_title_list%) an unordered list (ul).

One of the ways that Organize Series makes it possible to easily and finely tune the various ways in which series related content is displayed on your blog is via the use of a templates combined with a token system. “Tokens” are just a way of referring to text indicators that point the plugin to what you want the token to be replaced with when it executes the code. The token format Organize Series uses is %token%. The “key” is surrounded by “%” symbols.

Here’s an example of one of the templates showing you the token system at work.

Notice the highlighted tokens in the image: ‘%series_part%’, ‘%total_posts_in_series%’, %series_title_linked%’, and %postcontent%. The plugin uses the reference keys in each token and the positioning of each token to determine where you want the various series information displayed with this particular template.