Organizing posts in series
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Hi,
I am running a personal blog with theme Motion and I am pondering a use case I want to add, which is the organization of posts into (small) series and their display, access and navigation.
What I mean is this: suppose I am writing a series of small posts about “Heavenly Control”. Each post is (almost) self-contained but they are actually real follow-ups to each other.
The series might include posts with titles such as:
- Kingdom of Heaven
- Divine Authority
- The First Rule
The problem with regular blog-post listing is that, even if I add all these posts to a custom category “Series/Heavenly Control”, all the posts display in reverse chronological order, meaning the oldest post is at the bottom of the page. A casual visitor might start reading at the top, and they may not “get” that what they are reading is actually the latest installment of a series.
Now I could put the series into a page, and use a plugin (or perhaps a custum page template) to include the posts (of the category) in chronological order. Then I would want the pages of all the series to be prominently displayed on my front-page. Unfortunately, in my theme pages are like second-class citizens, and categories and posts are more central to the design.
The way I am trying it now is to have a category called “Series”. It has subcategories for every Series I make such as “Heavenly Control” and “Digital Piracy”. All of the posts that are part of a series are members of the subcategory. I create a “series header” which is another post that gives an overview of the series with links. I make sure that the header is newer in date than the actual series posts, so that it displays at the top. When you click on “Series” from the category bar, only the headers display (because of a mod to archive.php). When you click on a subcategory from the category bar, the header displays along with all the posts in reverse chronological order. (That is still not the way I would have it, but at least the reader knows which post to begin with.)
Ideally, there would be some indicator that said “This post is part of a series: <link>
My question to you is: do you have any ideas about how I could easily implement some level of organization around this Series concept? Should I use pages? Should I include all the posts into the ‘series-header’ after the <more> link, using a plugin? Should I modify archive.php so that the category displays in chronological order?
Or maybe you have a showcase of other ideas.
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