How-to: Publish a whole book on a blog?

I did something like this. Typically, posts are newest first, so, posting “chapters” results in:

1.2 Basic layout
1.1 What is a blog
Chapter 1 – Introduction

One can modify the index.php code to reverse sort, but for a blog that will have many posts over a year, say, readers will always be having to follow links to get to the latest posts.

But, here is an easy alternative: Bookmark your chapters and create a Sidebar that lists the chapters in their proper order.

1. Create a Blogroll category, say “Chapters” and note the category number assigned by WP (2 in this example).
2. Create each Chapter post; they will be viewed in reverse order, but that’s okay.
3. Modify the sidebar (you’ll need a theme with a sidebar, of course) like so:

<ul>
 Chapters
 <?php wp_list_bookmarks('category=2'); ?>
</ul>

4. For each Chapter post create a new Blogroll (Add) Link, like “Capter 1,” “Chapter 2,” “Chapter 3.”

When the site is viewed a list of Chapters should appear in the sidebar.

Here is an example site: http://gajennings.net/words/stories/

Where in the sidebar on the left is a similar list (although the header “Serials” is used rather than “Chapters”).

See also: http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/11/04/how-to-write-a-book/

I think the simplest option is to post all book pages or “chapters” as regular posts to a specific category, then use something like:

http://www.transycan.net/blogtest/2007/10/30/custom-query-string-reloaded-for-wordpress-23-with-tag-support/

to alter the sort order of the posts in that category, either by reversing the normal order by date (from DESCending to ASCending), or by title if prefixing them with something like Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on.

“You can also the “Edit timestamp” feature to force the ordering of your posts if you want to “insert” a chapter or section”
I think you can use this approach.

[sig moderated]

My book-in-progress has all posts in ascending order, even the posts on category pages (chapters). This leaves the Pages free for other articles. No messing with date stamps, plug-ins, or returning to pages to insert links for each new chapter. As for return readers needing to click through all the way to the end, a “Recent Posts” widget in the sidebar should take care of that. You can see my site for an example (it’s a book with some adult content so if you’re easily offended, don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Here’s how in detail:

As in the WordPress FAQ (http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/11/04/how-to-write-a-book/), create a page called “Front” with a child page called “Index” (but no Chapter page since you’ll use categories for the chapters. And also, not everyone will write only one post per Chapter, as the WP FAQ assumes.). Like the FAQ says, go to the WP dashboard Options > Reading
and make “front” the front of the blog but “index” have the posts. Copy the link from that “index” page and paste it into the “front” page with your introduction to the book. The link to the “index” page will show your entries, which are still in descending order for now, but we’ll fix that later.

Next, in the WP dashboard Manage > Categories, create some chapters (mine just say Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.). That way, when you write a post, you can check the Chapter it belongs in from the Category box on the right in the Write Post page.

Now, because of the blog structure, your book will show in descending order (latest posts first) unless you change some code in the PHP template files. In the WP dashboard Presentation > Theme Editor, select the Main Index Template. Just under the <?php get_header() ?> tag, insert this:

<?php query_posts($query_string . “&order=ASC”); ?>

Save and check to see if your blog now shows entries in ascending order. Depending on your theme, you may have links at the end of your main page pointing forward to “Next Entries” and back to “Earlier Entries,” and now they are backwards! If so, go back to the “Main Index” template again and scroll down to find the instructions under the <div id=”nav-below” class=”navigation”> tags:

You’ll notice some text alluding to “next” and “previous” entries. You can cut and paste to make them swap places with each other within the tags. In my template, I swapped ‘« Previous posts’ and ‘Next posts »’ and then swapped “nav-next” with “nav-previous”. Here’s how it looks now:

<div class=”nav-previous”><?php previous_posts_link(__(‘« Previous posts’, ‘blogtxt’)) ?></div>
<div class=”nav-next”><?php next_posts_link(__(‘Next posts »’, ‘blogtxt’)) ?></div>

Save. Check your blog to see that it works.

But wait! The chapters, if you saved them as Categories, still show latest entries first. So….

Go back to the Theme Editor and select the “Archives” (NOT “Archives Page”) template, and repeat the above steps.

I hope it works for you, too!

commentpress looks good but i’m a beginner and can’t figure out how to tweak it for my needs. if anyone here does inexpensive projects like that let me know!