Talking about Php and WordPress.
When I celebrated my four years of blogging I also introduced a big problem this blog is facing: there is so much content it’s not easy to find what you are looking for.
I received some interesting suggestions, and one of them is to link all posts of the same series. This is what a reader said: “In the first post, put a link of all the steps (requires manual editing)”.
I found a way to put an index on each post of a series using custom fields, and I am sure you’ll find it interesting. Let’s take Create a Flash game like Rebuild Chile series as example.
I want, in every post of the series, to show the full list of posts of the series. Without a lot of manual editing, of course.
So, that’s what I did: first, for every post of the series, I added a custom field called series with Create a Flash game like Rebuild Chile value. The idea is to add a series custom field to every post in every series with a proper value.
If you don’t know how to add a custom field, here it is a little help:
At the end of the Post page admin, you’ll find the form to add new custom fields. That’s how I added series custom field. Now, a few lines of code to rule them all… this is what you have to include somewhere inside the so-called WordPress Loop:
ID, 'series', true); if($series): ?>
Read all series
- ID != $post->ID): ?>post_title; ?>
Line 1: Assigning to a variable called $series the value of the series custom field value, if any. Then, if there is a value…
Line 5: Creating a $chapters array and populating it with every post (numberpost=-1) whose series custom field (meta_key=series) has $series value (meta_value=$series) ordering them by date (orderby=date) in ascending way (order=ASC). Then scanning the entire array, saving each item into $chapter
variable.
Line 6: Adding the post title, along with a link if it’s not the current post
The remaining lines are just HTML to let me style the content.
You can see the result in the Create a Flash game like Rebuild Chile series… I have to find the right style but I think I’m on the right way.
Do you like this way to use custom fields?
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