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.

For those not familiar with what the Organize Series WordPress plugin is or does - please visit this page.

This is a pretty significant changeset that fixes some things with the Series Table of Contents page:

• Series Table of Contents page now returns the correct header (’200′). It was returning ‘400′ before the fix. see this thread.
• NEW FEATURE: You can now indicate what the browser title bar will say on Series Table of Contents page via the Series Option settings in your admin. The default will be “Series Table of Contents Page”
• Fixed a conflict with “All In One SEO Pack” plugin affecting Series Table of Contents Page.
• Thanks to gnouros for detecting and testing my fixes of the above errors for me!
• Shortened the “official” plugin name to “Organize Series” to match the directory in the svn repository - hopefully this will fix the indicator not showing up in your plugin list for when there’s a new version of Organize Series out. See this post in the WP Support Forums.

Just thought I’d post a quick update that the current stable version of Organize Series is 2.0.3. Here’s a summarized change set since orgSeries 2.0:

• 2.0.1 - some fixes so that changing the SERIES_URL definition in orgSeries.php actually works (you can use this to pick how you want the series-archive permalinks to look - important for avoiding conflicts with existing category permalinks…)
• 2.0.2 - fixed Organize Series causing problems with other plugins that create their own top-level menus in your WordPress Administration. Previous to this fix you’d get ‘404′ errors on subpages of those plugin menus.
• 2.0.3 - I noticed that orgSeries 2.0.2 broke the “add series on the fly” feature on write/edit post pages (and also affected the layout of those pages). This release fixes that.

I thought I had nailed all the bugs before releasing Organize Series 2.0 - but of course, as it usually is, once code get’s in the wild all sorts of nasty creatures pop up

If you haven’t yet - I encourage you to download Organize Series 2.0.3.

If you’ve never heard of my Organize Series WordPress plugin feel free to read about it on it’s own nifty page.