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.

Well the bell has sounded. I’m done with ixwebhosting.com as my webhost. Frankly, their customer support is awful. It puzzles me that they are marketing themselves as the “business choice” for web hosting and yet their service is definitely not of business caliber. I guess if you’re a business that is just looking for a simple html page to give basic info on your business you’ll be okay but if you’ve got dynamic content running on your website - ixwebhosting is definitely not a good choice.

Over the past year and a half I put up with slowdowns, outages, and email problems as the normal “costs” of a cheap shared hosting plan. But the last straw for me was my experience in the past week. Here’s the breakdown.

1. Over the weekend (March 27-30, 2008), ixwebhosting.com moved all their servers (and customers) to a new data farm. I was warned well in advance of this move via email and also warned that this would mean downtime of about 48hours. There was nothing wrong with that - and they did their customers right by communicating what was about to happen. The move was done to put us on new servers and make things run faster and better - or so we were told.

I first reported about my webhost (ixwebhosting.com) doing a major server move last week that affected the uptime of unfoldingneurons.com and some of my other websites over the weekend.  At first it seemed like all things went well with the move (albeit not much improvement in speed as they said there would be), however since the move the php mail() function has been borked on my server and all the services dependent on that function don’t work.  That means that new people can’t register for my plugin support forums and people requesting a password change won’t get anywhere either.

I’ve been trying to get my host to speed up a fix but unfortunately there communication has been pretty much nil and aside from the “we’re working on it” that I obtained from a fellow named Artem in the chat support I have no clue as to when it’ll get fixed or what the problem is to begin with.

This is just one more thing to add to the list of things I’ve been dissatisfied with this host and if I haven’t heard anything from them by tomorrow I’m going to start looking at other webhosts for all my domains and websites.  I’ve got a list of webhosts I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while but maybe my readers will have some suggestions?

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.