How to Make a Post Series with WordPress

Instead of writing a really really long article, a better option would be that of breaking it down into a series of shorter posts/articles. Sadly WordPress does not provide in-built functionality for this. However, as usual, a host of plugins come to our rescue.

The best WordPress series plugins are the following, we’ll be discussing them in order of popularity (number of downloads).

Organize Series

With more than 50K downloads, this is by far the most popular series plugin for WordPress. Organize Series takes the hassle out of managing the serial posts and you can just focus on writing. Another way of saying this is, Organize Series takes the work out of organizing series so that you write more and your readers can EASILY follow along.

This is a free plugin although the author also provides add-ons at a cost. How does it work? The core WordPress has two taxonomies – “categories” and “tags”. Organize Series introduces a new taxonomy “series”.

Thanks to the rich api provided to plugin authors Organize Series takes advantage of (as much as possible) the built-in WP goodness. As an added bonus – plugin developers can expand on what Organize Series offers by interacting with the new series taxonomy and the built-in filters/hooks.

This is a full-featured plugin, if you’re looking for a series plugin with all the bells and whistles, this one’s the one.

Get Organize Series

EG-Series (Not updated)

Unlike the other two plugins we are considering today, EG-series does no use custom taxonomies, rather it used custom fields. One significant plug of EG-Series is that you can very easily manage posts in relation to series via a drag-and-drop interface. This is very useful if you are joining posts into a series as an afterthought. You can also configure your own shortcodes right after plugin activation.

EG-Series is my favourite series plugin at the moment.

Get EG-Series

Series (Not updated)

Series is a popular plugin by Justin Tadlock, it’s quite straightforward and also works by adding a new taxonomy called “series” to your blog that allows you to link together several posts in a series. Series will automatically create archives for you and offers several ways to link your posts together. It also comes with the following goodies:

• A widget to list posts from a particular series.
• A widget to list posts in the same series as the current post.
• Shortcodes to use within the post editor.

You first create the title of your series within the ‘Series’ taxonomy, then write your posts and tag them with the name of this new series. Following that you can use the two widgets provided to display posts in that series. You can also use the following shortcode to display the series that the post belongs to:

[php][ the-series ][/php]

If you need something easy and simple to set up, without any fancy features, this plugin is a sure bet.

Get Series