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One of the disadvantages of a chronologically organised blog is that older posts tend to get burried under newer ones. A shame when your posts do not have a limited shelf life. A similar problem occurs when you write posts that belong to a series of directly related posts, it is difficult for the reader to keep track of all parts and read them in the correct order.

In this article I will look at a few plugins that deal with these issues.

Series of posts

Travis Snoozy wrote the one of a kind plugin In Series, an invaluable tool for stringing together posts in a series. You can easily add, re-order and remove posts from a series from the Write/Edit Post page. It will automatically build a table of contents, previous/next links etc. This does not require you to hack your theme, it works right away. You can of course customize how series information is displayed.

This plugin is a must-have for me. Thanks to this plugin, whenever you add a new post to a series you won’t have to go through the hassle of editing every single previous post in the series and add a link to the latest addition, the plugin takes care of all that in a very elegant way. A huge time saver.

Related posts

There are many plugins available that can generate a list of posts related to the one being viewed, one of those tasks that is hard to keep up-to-date manually. Unfortunately most are out-of-date or have limited functionality, i.e. merely tag matching.

The best plugin I found so far, and one that works with WordPress 2.5.1, is Similar Posts by Rob Marsh. Similarity is judged according to a post’s title, content, and tags and you can adjust the balance of factors to fit your needs. If you like, you can even exclude specific posts or change a pletoria of other options. Pretty need!

This plugin requires an additional library plugin shared by the author’s various plugins and a simple inclusion in your single.php.

Popular posts

Knowing which posts are the most popular of your website can give you great insight in what your visitors are interested in. Perhaps you can write additional posts, provide even more specific information. Or maybe you simply want to publish a list of popular posts. A very popular plugin that can help you with that is Popularity Contest by Alex King. It keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses a balanced formula to calculate a popularity score for each post. Each view has a different weight attached, e.g. clicking a post’s permalink is weighted higher in the overall popularity score than merely viewing the post as shown on the homepage. You can adjust the weights according to your preferences.

The bad news is, the current version of Popularity Contest does not work with WordPress 2.5.1. The good news is, with a few pointers by Ken McGuire, I have patched the plugin to work properly without any further manual action required.

Popularity Contest plugin (patched for WordPress 2.5.1)

never saw the point in using content management systems. Afterall, I could build one from scratch that would do exactly what I wanted. And it would be way cooler! And I did, until I realised that working a full-time programming job and more of the same in all of my spare time is perhaps a bit overkill. Honing my skills is no longer the primary objective: I want to bring the fruits of my creativity out there, not spend all my time building the perfect back office for it.

So I started testing many of the open source content management systems out there. Just to name a few: Drupal, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, PostNuke, TikiWiki, Typo3 and many, many more. Each one has its merits but none left me impressed. Until I tried WordPress.

Pro: installs in under 5 minutes

Once you have that awesome idea for a new website, it is imperative to start writing right away. With WordPress, a fresh new install can be done in less than 5 minutes. Write away and worry about adding features and designing the website afterwards.

Pro: light weight, infinite new features

WordPress features top-notch publishing tools for a blog-like website. Everything you need is right there: posts & pages, categories & tags, RSS, comments, a media library, a well designed content management system and of course a fully customizable website. More importantly, it is relatively light weight: it does not drag around lots of unneeded features ‘conveniently’ build in already and impossible to remove.

Pro: excellent plugin system

Writing plugins for WordPress is easy and fun, at some point you will definitely want to give it a try. With most other systems I usually got impatient doing it ‘the proper way’ or what I wanted simply couldn’t be done. Or I needed to follow some bizarre framework that didn’t make any sense at all. I would start hacking away in the core files, upgrading would from then on become a major hassle. Apart from a rare exception or two, I have never had to resort to hacking WordPress’s core files. Writing a plugin would do the trick instead, without breaking anything.

Because there is such an active community of plugin developers, there is usually a number of plugins to chose from that can do exactly what you had in mind. It is really quite amazing and a major time saver. It usually takes one click to install them. And if the author catches a bug or adds new features you will get a new version notification, again requiring just one click to upgrade. Simply amazing.

Pro: well organised back office, clean & efficient

One of the things that turned me off from using other CMS are poorly designed back offices littered with options, frequently needed ones completely burried under layers of exotic ones. It does not inspire to get the job done. WordPress’s back office works really well. The options you need are there, less frequently used options are hidden by default but still available if you need them. Everything is divided up in a way that makes sense to me. The back office itself is easy on the eyes, particularly well designed.

Cons: your way vs. the WordPress way

There are of course certain advantages to going about it yourself. Every developer has its own personal logic, a certain way of doing things. It might not make any sense to others, but it works for you. Using a system not build by yourself does mean that you will have to get used to another way of getting things done. If WordPress can do 95% of what you had in mind, fixing that final 5% will take you a lot longer than it would have if you had build it from scratch. It is still a lot easier to adopt to though.

Cons: WordPress needs regular upgrades

Using a system that powers many websites attracts attention. Hackers out there are actively searching for bugs to exploit so it is in your best interest to follow upgrade notifications by the WordPress team to the letter. Development is also going at an impressive rate and you will need to keep up: there is pretty good backwards compatibility, but if you delay upgrading long enough you will find that newer plugins no longer work with your version of WordPress. Of course there’s also the issue of older, complicated plugins that are no longer maintained and don’t seem to work with the newest version of WordPress…

Conclusion

WordPress isn’t perfect. While I have seen plugins pulling off major stunts, if your purpose is anything other than a blog/informative website, you really should look for one of the more specific open-source projects out there. Or pick up your programming tool belt afterall. But think twice before you go at it by yourself if WordPress can do the trick for you. Don’t make it about pride: focus on the end result. You’ll thank me later.