Look Ma! No PHP Hacking!
Well, I finally sat down and hammered out a basic UI for my In Series Linker, and integrated the whole thing into the In Series plugin. What does this mean for users? It means that now you can use In Series to link your articles together without having to modify your templates. It doesn’t quite work out of the box yet, but that should be just a matter of setting proper defaults.
This code is currently checked into the In Series trunk, and I intend to cut a 2.2 release once I’ve gotten any major issues worked out. Testers are always appreciated — if you’re interested in testing, but don’t have an environment to test in, leave a comment, and I’ll see if I can’t assist.
Instructions for getting the code to work (subject to change whenever I do another checkin):
- Back up your database (unless you don’t care about your data…)
- Install and activate the new In Series plugin (naturally)
- If you didn’t have to activate the plugin, deactivate and then activate it
Go to the “options” admin panelGo to the “series” sub-panel
Going to the setup panel will initialize the defaults for the plugin; currently, this will not cause any new tags to appear (i.e., this won’t quite work out-of-the-box for new users, but it’s close). Tick some of the boxes, save your settings, and then you should see new link-related information automagically appear in the requested places. Enjoy!
All right; I have the defaults set up and checked in, now. Note that you must activate the plugin for the defaults to get set — this means you will need to deactivate and then activate the plugin if you already had it installed and activated. Note that existing users will not have any tags inserted by default — this is a feature to help prevent ugliness happening when an existing user (with modified templates) turns on the new plugin. You can turn on the automagic tag insertion feature at your own pace (after removing the tags from your templates), or not at all. New users (i.e., ones who don’t have any In Series data in their database) will start with most of the auto-insertion features turned on, to help promote the best out-of-the-box experience.
