If you have ever written a series of articles for your blog, you know how much extra time it takes to link the articles together. Every new article you create requires you to go back to the previous articles and add a link to the new one. If your series is only two or three articles in the set, it's not that much bother. But if your series has 4 or more articles, it becomes a pain in the neck in a hurry.
Here's a plugin I have been playing with for the last couple of days and I'm impressed with how easy it is to use. The In-Series plugin for Wordpress allows you to create a Series and add aritcles to the Series. All of the linking between the articles is automated. All you need to do is add your article to the new Series and the plugin does the rest. It has worked flawlessly for me.
If you have an existing series of articles, organizing them is a snap. Simply set up a new Series, add your old articles to the new Series you create and all of the old articles are updated with links between them. It's sweet!
At the bottom of each article, a new list of all articles in the series appears. It took me less than 10 minutes to add all 6 of these existing articles to my new series. And that included a little editing time.
When you install the plugin, a new dialogue box is added to the "Write Post" and "Edit Post" pages of your Admin Panel. When you use it the first time, the dropdown list is empty and you must assign a name to your Series. There are also the choices to 'prepend' and 'append' your article to the series. So if you ever decide you want to add a new article to the beginning of the series, you can do so. Just check off the 'prepend' option, and your article is added to the beginning of the list. How cool is that?
If you get your articles into the series in the wrong order, simply pull up the edit screen, and select 'Unlink" from the pulldown box. Then you can re-order your articles whatever way you see fit. It's quite easy.
On the 'Options' page of your Admin Panel you will also have a new choice called 'Series'. There are several things you can change like whether to put you Table of Contents at the top of your articles or the bottom. The only thing that appears to be missing is the ability to edit a series name. So be careful when you type it in. Of course you can always correct an error by editing the database. But, you have to be comfortable fiddling around in your database and most users are not comfortable with that at all.
One of the things I love about Wordpress is the fact that so many plugins are available. Open source communities are terrific resources in that respect. Plugins are free! Most plugin developers will have a 'donate' link on their home page. If you really, really like a plugin, think about donating to the developer. But, it is not a requirement.
This plugin gets my vote for the week! It is useful. It was easy to install. It is easy to use. And it worked exactly the way it was supposed to. It has also been around for a while, so the bugs have already been worked out.
If you would like to see it in action click here. I have my blog set up so the Table of Contents for the Series is at the bottom of the article. Everything in the ToC list was added by the plugin.
