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.