We write a lot of multi-part post series on our blog and manually managing a table of contents. Across sets of WordPress posts are wildly inefficient and to put it bluntly, annoying. No-one should have to go back and edit older posts after writing a new one. Just to keep a full table of contents, that’s why we’re using a powerful blogging platform in the first place. To make the experience of blogging painless. It also means a potential lack of consistency between how different authors decide to draw up their table of contents without an editor doing it.
Why not use existing WordPress post series plugins?
There are existing WordPress post series plugins however after checking them out we weren’t completely happy with the way they functioned. The majority of them leverage post taxonomies which seemed overkill for our needs — we wanted something simple and lightweight. Additionally, some of the ones we checked out had little control over the order outside of publishing date.
The MultiPart Posts Plugin
I developed a quick and simple plugin to do the task for us, leveraging post metadata for each post in the post series and providing a simple drag n’ drop interface for re-ordering. It automatically syncs across the included posts and is SUPER easy to use!
You can check it out on the WordPress plugin repo here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/multi-part-posts/
Finally, here’s a couple of screenshots so you can see what it’s all about:
Config Meta Box:
How it looks:
