compartments

I’m having the same problem as ladydelaluna. Except it’s telling me there aren’t any posts in ANY of my categories. Anybody know of a plugin for managing categories that works? I really like the Simple Tags plugin for managing tags.

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!