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.

Just thought I’d post a quick update that the current stable version of Organize Series is 2.0.3. Here’s a summarized change set since orgSeries 2.0:

• 2.0.1 - some fixes so that changing the SERIES_URL definition in orgSeries.php actually works (you can use this to pick how you want the series-archive permalinks to look - important for avoiding conflicts with existing category permalinks…)
• 2.0.2 - fixed Organize Series causing problems with other plugins that create their own top-level menus in your WordPress Administration. Previous to this fix you’d get ‘404′ errors on subpages of those plugin menus.
• 2.0.3 - I noticed that orgSeries 2.0.2 broke the “add series on the fly” feature on write/edit post pages (and also affected the layout of those pages). This release fixes that.

I thought I had nailed all the bugs before releasing Organize Series 2.0 - but of course, as it usually is, once code get’s in the wild all sorts of nasty creatures pop up

If you haven’t yet - I encourage you to download Organize Series 2.0.3.

If you’ve never heard of my Organize Series WordPress plugin feel free to read about it on it’s own nifty page.

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.

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.