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).

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.

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.

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 ).