Post Series Premium Plugin Review

Post Series is a premium plugin developed by Valen Designs of Code Canyon that allows you to easily organize posts into logical series and groups.

From the author:

The Post Series plugin creates a custom “series” post type and then builds the necessary interface to properly utilize it. Based on the same code that Tuts+ uses to create their sessions, but with some enhancements to the code base.

• Organize posts into logical series or groupings.
• Easily create a landing page with a table of contents for each series using a shortcode.
• Uses Live Search to add posts to your series
• Based on the code that’s used for the Tuts+ Sessions
• Built for WordPress 3.0+
• Extremely simple to use!

The basic premise of the plugin is to group posts into a series. When you add a post to the series it dynamically organizes them for easy navigation. All the heavy lifting is done by the plugin, all you need to do is create a series and add posts to it. Post Series are very similar to regular posts in the fact that they are included in the loop and you can tag and categorize them.

I picked up a copy from Code Canyon to try it out.

Upon activation, I could immediately tell that the plugin was well written and easy to use. The first thing I did was go and create my first series for my widget tutorials. It was extremely simple and just like adding any other post. I was able to enter a description of the series and also categorize it into the necessary section of my website.

Once I’d created my “Working with Widgets” series, it was then awesomely easy to add already-written post to the series through the “live-search” feature. All I had to do was type in the name of the post I wanted to add and a list of possible candidates was presented via ajax. I simply chose the one I wanted. Then I was also able to drag and drop the posts into the appropriate order.

If I’d wanted, I also could have added a post to the series from the post itself, instead of the series page. One of the really nice features is that you can insert new posts into the middle of series as well, not just the end. So if you have written a series of posts and then realize you missed one, you can go back and add a new one in and it will automatically push the other back, keeping the order correct.

One of the most useful features of the plugin, is the series navigation that it adds to the top of posts that are part of a series. So if I am viewing part 2 of a series, there will be a link to part one, and also part 2, as well as a popup menu of all posts within the series. All within a very clean, minimal box.

There are a few things I wish the plugin included, which are not, unfortunately. First, it would be excellent if there was an option to automatically display the list of posts within a series on the main series page, rather than requiring that we put a template tag in our theme. A short code to display the series list would also be nice. Just something for those users who are not comfortable editing their theme.

Aside from the couple of things I wish the plugin included, it is a great plugin and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for an easy way to manage their series.