Simple Series WordPress Plugin Update

Making cereals
Making cereals

This weekend, almost an entire year from the last update, I made some revisions to my Simple Series plugin for WordPress.1 This is one of the plugins that I use the most often for WordPress.  It’s right up there, in terms of frequency, with the WP-Footnotes plugin that lets me insert footnotes.2

As much as I loved this plugin, it was always a little bit of  pain to use.  In order for two posts to be associated together in the same series, the title must be listed exactly the same in each post.  So, to make sure that I was getting it right, I would open an old post in the relevant series, copy the exact plugin shortcode with the exact title, and paste it into the new post.

With this update you can click the “Add Series” button in the TinyMCE text editor for a post and insert any series title you’ve previously used.  It’s not yet as elegant as I would like, but it makes a few button clicks out of a what used to be an annoying process.3 I’ve also added the ability to have a series between pages, posts, or any combination of the two kinds of content types.

Default Series Title
  1. Photo courtesy of Tavo []
  2. Like this! []
  3. Described in the prior paragraph []

Simple Series with SEO! after just one day

I’m really happy to report that per the WordPress.org stats, this little post series plugin has been downloaded more than 100 times so far.  That’s really awesome.  And, now that I’ve figured out how to work this wacky SVN thing, I think it would be fun to release some of the other random little plugins I’ve developed over the last few years.

As of the latest version 1.4, the plugin is now easy to modify with some CSS added to your stylesheet.  I could have added this as a text field option a settings page for the plugin, but I really like the stripped down simplicity of the plugin as is.  Even with all the comment lines in the plugin, it is only 53 lines of code.  If super short code were a goal1 I could probably cut that in half.2

Now I have to find some of my old plugins that others might find useful.  I’ve got one for frame escaping, one for making pie charts…  I know there are a few other random ones as well.

Default Series Title
  1. And it isn’t []
  2. Obviously, I’m not going to do this since it would make the code next to illegible []