Series of posts, related posts & popular posts
Monday, June 2nd, 2008One 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 Unfortunately most are out-of-date or have limited functionality, i.e. merely tag matching.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.