Categories and tags in WordPress are great. They offer a lot of flexibility for grouping your posts in many different ways. Many users may never need anything more than categories and tags, but I often feel the need for a more controlled way to group my posts so that it is easier for readers to follow along.
A series differs from WordPress’ built-in grouping paradigms of categories and tags in two ways:
First, a series is specific– posts in a series are strongly connected to each other by theme or topic. Whereas a post may be assigned multiple categories or tags, a post can only be in one series.
Second, a series is sequential– the order of posts is important. One post in a series should lead into the next. Whereas post order in categories and tags is based on post properties such as publication date or title, the posts in a series can be manually arranged by the author for maximum impact. Put simply, a series is a curated group of posts.
There are many cases where grouping posts in a series would be useful to both authors and readers– project logs, field notes for a product review, multi-part tutorials, chapters in a story, and a sequence of classes/lessons would all benefit from being part of a series. Authors curate a group of posts and offer them to readers as a “box-set”, while readers can easily continue from one post in the series to the next.
Therefore, I’m building a series plugin for WordPress to provide this functionality. Also, it’s only logical that my progress on this project should be documented in a series of posts that will benefit from the development of this plugin. Though the posts may initially lack a specific connection to each other, they will become more connected and organized with each post that discusses a new feature or development in the plugin. Very meta indeed.
I’ll be completely revealing my WordPress plugin development process, so I hope you’ll join me as I build this plugin.
A Question, dear reader
Finally, here is a question for you: What do you want to see in a series plugin for WordPress?
Discuss
Terence
February 26, 2013 – 2:28 amI used Derek Herman’s plugin http://codecanyon.net/item/post-series/239344?ref=valendesigns on a couple of sites, and while it works pretty well, it does have one annoying habit. You can’t easily move the series menu it creates so, in the series, much of the menu shows up in the SEO page meta description unless you code it specifically. It would be much better if the series menu could be placed with a shortcode, for example.
Sol
February 26, 2013 – 7:48 am@Terence: Thanks for the feedback. Shortcodes are definitely part of the plan, as is optional inclusion of series information in a post (links to other entries, etc.)
Terence
February 28, 2013 – 3:43 pmSee what happens?
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0a4zofrdc
It gets stuck at the top of the page and you can’t move it.
Terence.