Post series are something that most bloggers should consider writing from time to time.  A post series is a great way to break up one long post into several smaller posts.  This carries some advantages in making the information easier to read in smaller chunks and also encourages visitors to subscribe or to return to your blog later to read the next part of the series.

I recently wrote a four part series over at my tech blog about how to be an IT contractor.  With so much information to cover I needed to break it up into four posts (and each of them is still quite long).  But I also wanted to make sure that someone reading one of the posts could easily find links to the other parts of the series.

The solution is to use the In Series plugin for WordPress.  In Series lets you create a new series, add blog posts to it, reorder the posts, and automatically generates a table of contents for your series and inserts it in each post.  This saves you a lot of time because you don’t need to manually manage your own table of contents and go back to each earlier post in the series to update the links each time a new part is posted.

This is how one of the blog posts in my “How to be an IT contractor” series looks with the In Series plugin.

The default styling of the table of contents was not to my liking but fortunately In Series uses CSS classes for styling so you can simply add some code to your style sheet to get the table of contents looking exactly how you wish.  Here is my CSS code as an example:

.series_toc {
	margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px;
	padding-left: 5px;
	border-width: 1px;
	border-color: #cfcfcf;
	border-style: solid;
	}

.series_toc h3 {
	text-align: center;
	font-size: 11px;
	font-style: Italic;
	color: #6f6f6f;
	}

Tagged as: Plugins, WordPress