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.

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).