When I first started off in the WordPress blogging world there are a few things I discovered fairly quickly:

1. WordPress is a kick-butt platform for publishing on the web. It’s not only a great tool for typical blogging usage but also makes a great system for designing CMS based websites.
2. There’s an awesome community behind WordPress. Having such a big and helpful community certainly makes learning and using WordPress all the more easier.
3. There’s tons of plugins that extend the capabilities of what WordPress can do.
4. I like tweaking and playing with the codebase of WordPress.
5. There’s nothing built into the core for handling series of articles…

That last point was something that I encountered more and more as developed other websites (in particular my sermons website at UnashamedSermons.com). Out of that need and not finding a plugin to meet that need I went on to write what is now known as the Organize Series WordPress Plugin. Of course, shortly after the first release I was pointed to the “InSeries Plugin” currently being maintained by Travis Snoozy. He’s doing good work with In-Series but bleh, I decided a little competition won’t hurt (and I like my approach to series a bit better ).  (UPDATE 10/22/09: InSeries is no longer maintained and does not work with the latest version of WordPress – there are now other series plugins at the WordPress plugin repository)  

For the next few articles in this series I’m going to focus on the Series Options Page and go over all the different settings that are possible there.

First we’re going to look at the “Automation Settings” section:

The majority of this section controls the automatic insertion of series related information in your blog. In most cases, you will want to leave everything here as is but there are cases where you may want to have more fine control over the addition of series related information in your blog theme so Organize Series makes it possible for you to do so. Here’s a run down of the different options in this section:

“Display list of series on post pages?”

Toggling this checkbox indicates whether you want the series postlist box to be displayed on the page of a post that belongs to a series. If you leave this unchecked, the postlist box will not be displayed automatically and you will have to insert the template tag yourself (I’ll be devoting a whole section to template tags in a later post in this series). The style and “layout” of the postlist box is controlled by the `Series Post List Template` in the “Template Tags Section” on the series options page.  

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, the series postlist box you see on this page.

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).