In Series
You may want to visit the official In Series home page.
Well, I’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes here; part of that has been working on taking maintainership of the In Series plugin. In Series is a plugin, originally written by Scott Merrill, which provides template authors with hooks to link together inter-related articles — that is, to link together articles that are in a series. You can check out the original releases at their old site; new releases will be made here at REM State.
I found In Series while working on switching REM State to WordPress. I knew that I would eventaully want some mechanism to link together series of articles, since I like to write series, but not with all of the articles back-to-back. However, there were several features that people wanted to see In Series develop, one of which was a GUI feature so that you didn’t have to remember series names and numbers. I agreed that this would be a tremendous boost to the plugin’s usability, and so I wrote the code and submitted a patch. One thing led to another, and the plugin was handed off to me to be maintained.
Feel free to back up your WordPress database and download the latest, bleeding-edge version of the plugin from the SVN repository. I still have some work I’d like to get done before making a new release, but I’ll try to keep the trunk mostly-working with every check-in I make. Note that, while I will try to keep the SVN version functioning, I cannot guarantee that it will work at any given time — please back up your database before upgrading to a new version of In Series, especially if you’re trying a version from SVN. For the next release, I’m shooting for:
GUI integrationConversion of old database key names to the new key names (so existing users can migrate)- Integration of my “In Series Linker” prototype
- Fixes for any bugs that get uncovered
get_all_series returning unexpected values(hopefully fixed)
14 Responses to “In Series”
Posted: Jan 10th, 2007 at 09:56
[…] REM State has taken over support and management of the In-Series WordPress Plugin and you can find their latest version at the REM State In-Series WordPress Plugin page. They’ve added a GUI interface and a few other bells and whistles. […]
Posted: Feb 22nd, 2007 at 02:19
[…] InSeries plugin>> […]
Posted: Feb 23rd, 2007 at 19:53
Okay, I think I must not be the sharpest knife in the drawer right now, but I’m not a techie. I’m used to downloading a zip file for a plugin, but for the in series, I don’t see a download for a zip file. What do I do to get these files uploaded so that I can use the plugin?
Posted: Feb 23rd, 2007 at 21:31
@KWiz
This page has no downloads. You probably want the In Series project page, which maintains a direct link to the plugin. As far as installation goes, just drop in-series.php into your plugins directory, as before.
Posted: Feb 23rd, 2007 at 21:55
Sorry to seem stupid, but when I click on the download link, all I get is code. I don’t get the opportunity to save the file into a directory or anything like that.
Posted: Feb 23rd, 2007 at 22:19
Oh! Right click, then select “Save As.” Sorry about that. :)
Posted: Mar 5th, 2007 at 17:36
Have updated to WP 2.1.2 and when working on an article, the first in a series I get this:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/rach/public_html/wp-content/plugins/in-series.php on line 281
That line in the code reads as follows
foreach ($series_posts as $s_id => $s_title) {
What do I need to do to fix?
Posted: Mar 9th, 2007 at 08:26
I don’t know if this is a bug or if I’m doing something wrong, but I can’t get the Table of Contents to show up in a “In Series” post on my blog’s main page. Is it supposed to be possible?
Thanks for the great plugin!
Posted: Mar 9th, 2007 at 17:50
@Greg
You’re the second person to request this, so I’m deeming it a “missing feature” — which, for all intents and purposes, is a bug. :)
Posted: Mar 13th, 2007 at 06:48
@Quandary,
Thanks for the response, the work and the great plugin. Any idea if you’ll be able to release a version that includes that “missing feature” anytime soon?
Thanks again!
Posted: Mar 13th, 2007 at 07:43
@Greg
Probably not in the next two weeks, but potentially in the next month. I’ve decided I’m just going to go for the 3.0 rewrite instead of trying to heap features onto the current architecture — especially in light of the fact that I’m presently leaving some users out in the cold (namely, those using MySQL prior to 4.1).
Posted: Mar 17th, 2007 at 05:13
Forgive me if this is a daft question: Does In-Series simply show the list of the related articles, or does it create a list of links to the related articles? In other words, if someone wants to skip an article and go to a different one, is there a way to do it besides hitting “next article?”
Besides that, kudos on making an easy to use plugin.
Posted: Mar 17th, 2007 at 05:15
Ah. It was daft. I’m so sorry, it was very early and it didn’t occur to me that the reason it looked like a list was because I was testing with only one article in the series.
This is a really lovely plug-in. Thank you.
Posted: Mar 17th, 2007 at 20:47
@Mary Robinette Kowal
Nah; questions like that are still actually helpful, because it gives me a little bit of insight into the assumptions that I make. The “first time” experience is very important, but it’s hard to ever get more than one per person — which means that it can be a little tricky to engineer.
I’m glad that you find the plugin easy to use. :)