The End

To present a list showing all posts from a single series of related writings.

A Solution

This can be accomplished in a myriad of ways. A quick look at the plugin repository shows that most plugins for series management utilize some taxonomy to accomplish post relations. This is a good and natural solution, especially for the end-user. I could also imagine a custom meta field being used. I’ve opted to implement this feature on this blog via a simple code snippet. There are a few benefits of this approach.

• It does not require the addition of another plugin. (To manage the snippet, I do use Code Snippets which I’ve already installed for other purposes.)
• Posts within a series can easily extend across custom post types. (If I ever had such a need.)
• All aspects of the series can be managed from one location.
  • In order to add or remove posts from a series, I do not need to edit each post individually.
  • Change the name of the series directly in the snippet.
  • Control how the series list is displayed along the content of the post.

The drawback is that it requires me to edit code every time I’d like to modify a series, thus not a great solution for widespread use by non-technical authors. Here is the snippet I have added to my site. The code should explain itself.

https://gist.github.com/UaMV/f726e3741e9c9a12357c

All I need do to add a series is add an additional element to the $series array. I can then add posts to a series by adding post IDs to its corresponding array. You can see the results of this snippet here and here.

• Joshua Vandercar
• September 4, 2015
• Technology
•  
• Previous Post
• Next Post