In Series – The WordPress Plugin I Use To Power This Blog

wordpress_logoI receive many mails asking how I’ve implemented a certain feature available on techdreams blog. In order to give an oversight of features available on this blog and the plug-ins that power techdreams, I’m going to write a series of posts and this is the first post.

In Series is one of my favorite WordPress plug-in that allows us to connect similar post and create a blog posts series. On this blog I wrote four posts about the web sites that allows user to watch free movies, listen to music and watch live news. As user who read about watching movies are very likely to read about listening music and watching news, I connected all the articles with the help of In Series plug-in and created a series called “Online Entertainment”. If you visit the post 5 Websites to watch movies, it shows the other posts in the series as shown in the image

in_series_plugin_output

3 Reasons to Use In Series

Connecting Posts – Any number of posts can be connected by just specifying a series name and all the background work is done for you. No fuss, no editing of old articles and pasting links. In Series automatically adds all the required links to all the posts and creates a easy to navigate links between the posts.

Increase page views – If relevant posts are connected, then users are mostly likely to visit all the posts even though they land on any one of the posts in the series. More page views means, more ad revenue.

Searching Engine Optimization– Linking the posts is always a good idea for SEO.

Tweaking In Series Plug-in

Now you know the advantages of using In Series plug-in. Lets us look at how to tweak the plug-in to configure it to suit our blog theme

Series location In the post- At the top or bottom

You can display the series links at the top of the post or at the bottom of the post. By default In Series displays the series links at the top of the post. If you want to change it to the bottom of the post open plugin settings page(Settings->Series) and replace content of “Post layout:” input box with the following

%content <div class=’series_toc’>%toc</div> <!– <div class=’series_links’>%prev %next</div> ->

In the above code the %content is place at the beginning of the post. That means post body should be displayed first and then the series links are displayed.

Changing Series heading text

The heading text displayed for the series link in the blog post can be configured by changing “Table of contents layout:” available in settings text.

Limitations Of The Plugin

As I write this post, the current version of In Series plugin is 3.0.12. This version has few limitations or at least these are requirements that makes using of this plugin more fun

Does not support with multiple author – The series created by one author is not accessible to another author of a blog. So I can’t link my articles with my brother’s articles on this blog even though our articles are about relevant content.

You can’t turn off series links on home page – Yeah, this is one the other limitation. The series links are always displayed irrespective of whether the post is displayed on a home page or single post page.

But you know the good news? The next release of In Series is expected to overcome all these limitations. The beta version of new In Series is available for download here

Download In Series Plugin

You can download In Series plugin from WordPress In Series Plugin page

2 thoughts on “In Series – The WordPress Plugin I Use To Power This Blog”

  1. Hey Gopinath — thanks for the write-up on In Series!

    I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but the “next release” you mention here probably won’t be coming any time soon — it’s been nearly a year since I stopped developing In Series, and I don’t see myself starting up again anytime soon. Fortunately, the only issues that have been reported to me have to do with WP’s versioning feature interfering, and a handful of problems mistakenly attributed to my plugin. Hopefully the good luck will continue to hold out. :)

  2. Quandary, thanks for dropping by my post and letting us know about the InSeries development.

    Let me tell you again that you are a wonderful person. Thank you very much for providing us such an useful plugin.

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