At the present time, there are three WordPress plugins that organise series of posts.
Travis Snoozy’s ‘In Series‘, Darren Ethier’s ‘Organize Series‘, and Justin Tadlock’s ‘Series‘.
Travis Snoozy’s In-Series has served me well for a couple of years, but he is expressing reluctance about maintaining the plugin after several recent changes in WordPress’ core.
This means that in the long term, you have a choice between Darren Ethier’s Organize Series and Justin Tadlock’s Series.
They both exploit a new taxonomy function in WordPress that is unlikely to be altered for a long time. The downside (for me, anyway) is that I have to get my head around some concepts which are very new to me, but I’ll be happy to grapple with new stuff if it means I can keep my series in order!
I’ll almost certainly use ‘Organize Series’ because of the huge amount of helpful documentation on the authors site.
Nice writeup satoridork.
Just adding this:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/series though Justin’s plugin isn’t tagged with series.
Thank you MichaelH. My name is also MichaelH(irsh) so replying to you is rather strange!
Your addition of Emmanuel Gorjeon’s EG Series (I wonder how he dreamt up that plugin’s name?) is a really gratifying discovery for me.
Just after writing that comment to rughooker, I loaded up Darren Ethier’s ‘Organize Series’ plug in and got Fatal Errors, no matter how many other plugins I disabled.
I then turned to install Justin Tadlock’s ‘Series’ plugin.
I don’t know whether it’s just me being thick, or whether anyone else finds his installation and use instructions are a bit vague and generalised, but after reading the readme file several times, I still had little idea of how to deploy the plugin, step by step.
I was reluctant to pay to join his support forum until I knew how the plugin behaved, and whether it was right for my blog.
If I were to have a problem with the plugin, then I think it fair enough to pay for support, but I didn’t feel it was right to pay for an accurate how-to of the functioning of ‘Series’. Sorry, Justin
Which is why it’s good to discover EG-Series; It seems to tick all the boxes, at least on first sight. I’ll give it a whirl and report back if it’s successful.
Michael (satoridork). You’re getting fatal errors with Organize Series? It’d be great if you could post something about your issues on my Support Forums. This is the first time I’ve heard of fatal errors…
Hi,
Just some details about the EG-Series plugin.
This plugin is named EG-Series because I haven’t the patience to find original names (which do not exist already). So, all my plugins start therefore by my initials.
I think that Organized-Series and EG-Series cannot be compared. The first one tries to provide a complete set of features, and the second tries to be as simple as possible.
The main goal of EG-Series is to provide basic functions for managing series, without adding anything to WordPress. So, EG-Series uses the custom fields, and tries to be as light as possible. So I don’t know, for example, if I will add features such as “previous” or “next” links.
If you need more features, such as thumbnail for series, series description, … I think you have to try Organized Series or In-Series.
Some clarification. The ONLY table Organize Series adds to the database is for images attached to series. EVERYTHING else hooks into the built-in WordPress core taxonomy system and custom-fields (I use custom fields for the series parts).
I love the fact however that people do have an option with EG-Series, for some, less features will work way better for them 🙂
Thanks to the plugin authors for adding to these descriptions, it really helps users to decide things. 🙂
I finally got back to this project and was thrilled with all the info. Thanks everyone. I did install Organize Series. Only had a short time with it this morning but got two series up and running. So far, I am really pleased with it. You guys saved me hours and hours!
rughhooker, How’s Organize Series working for you? I’d be interested in seeing your implementation of it! Throw a linky up here 😉
If you have Ozh’s admin drop down menu plugin installed and activated, then don’t bother using organize series. You will get an error and the author of the plugin has admitted that he has a limited amount of time and a limited knowledge of the script language he used in order to fix the post problem.
Until someone posts a fix to this otherwise great plugin, I’d say use EG, Hacken or series or else…
