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.

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.