In the last post, I talked about how you can show off the latest series in your sidebar.  One of the caveats of the latest_series() function/widget is that it only shows one series.  The “latest series” function is just a way of giving readers quick insight into the most recent series you’ve published to your blog and is the easiest to customize.

However, there is another more powerful function included with Organize Series that you can use to output a list of all the series you’ve written where you want that acts very similar to the “wp_list_categories()” template tag in the WordPress core. What that means is that if you’ve already got a handle on how to use “wp-list_categories” then you’ll have no problem with “wp_list_series()”.  Let’s take a closer look:

The Widget

For those of you who are uncomfortable with editing your theme files and who are using a theme with widgets enabled there is a widget included with Organize Series that you can use to output the list of series in your sidebar.

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.

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.

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.