It pays to read the Readme…

I’ve been trying for some time to get the category drop-downs to work in the main menu.

Oh, you didn’t realise? Yes — there’s a page menu right next to a category menu.

Not that it matters to the naked eye — or the clothed one for that matter — they look the same for all intents and purposes.

The reason there’s two menus side-by-side is so I can easily arrange the various stories (the blog posts) into a coherent order for my burgeoning readership (ie. You.).

It’s fundamentally hard to create a wordpress page that has blog posts on it. And blog posts are the easiest way to add content to the site without having to go into manually creating each page, the links, and all the rest of it. Far easier to create individual posts and link them to the various categories.

For example, you’ll find the first story “Fire with Fire” is linked to “Book 1″, “Daisy”, “Prime”, “Miss Rook” and “Colonel Panix”.

This would be extremely hard to achieve on individual pages.

Now to my other problem – clearly stating the order of the posts for the drop-down menu.

This initially worked because I was numbering each post (eg: 1-2:Confinement), etc. However, when I reached 10, things went pear-shaped.

The traditional numbering system in WordPress is one of two things — orderby — which can be postname or id, or orer which is asc or des (ascending or descending).

Useless in all cases for the posts.

I’ve had “My Category Order” installed for some time, but was unable to get it to work for the drop-down fields. An hours research finally paid-off though.

Because in the Readme file is a single PHP statement which does the work for me.

*sigh*.

Onto the next challenge!

ps. It’s funny how much of the work that’s going into the site is actually invisible UNLESS IT DOESN’T WORK. It’s all about a seamless user-experience. That and me trying to avoid screaming and banging my head against the wall beside me.

Finally a Series plugin that works!

I’ve been mucking around for most of the evening on “series” plugins for WordPress and the Daisy Donnie site.

My requirement was as follows:

I need a way to regroup related posts (other than with just categories). The logic is that the Daisy Donnie stories work in two ways — the first is the literal run through the book, and the other is inter-related stories which make up a specific storyline (or series). I need a sidebar widget for preference to display these and the order of stores, and to allow the reader to select the stories one-at-a-time (rather than with the whole lot on a single page which is — to be honest — unworkable reading-wise).

So, I started with in-series, which after an hour of playing around, found out that it’s no-longer supported and is broken in this version of WordPress. Would have been nice to have had this information on the WordPress plugin page. Oh well.

Next was Organize Series, which worked to a point. I was able to get the posts into the “series” relatively easily, and determine a manual order (rather than ordering by date or by title, which is the only apparent shortcoming of the plugin I eventually got working. But more on that later). However, with this plugin was a major issue. While it had a widget for the sidebar (Yaay!), and it listed the Series titles (W00t!), when you clicked the series title, the page that displayed didn’t actually list the stories specifically set for the series. It actually excluded them. Subsequent testing determined that it wasn’t doing that either. It was just determining its own order based upon nothing in partucluar. I left a message on the site, and am awaiting a response.

Strike Two.

The third option, Series,  was a similar failure, simply because it was really hard to work-out how to make the posts display as belonging to the series. Maybe I was missing something, or had become bored.

This soon changed with Hackadelic Series, which required an additional plugin: Hackadelic Sliding Notes. This worked really well. And I’ve left it on in the blog to act as a Table of Contents of sorts for the posts that belong to series. However, it didn’t come with a sidebar widget so people could find the specific series titles and the stories (posts) that belonged to it.

After some further mucking around in Google, and ignoring an apparently unrelated post, I was ready to give it up. Then I took a look at the aforementioned post and found another one.

EG-Series – here was a plugin that I was willing to try as a last resort… and it worked. Oh did it work!

I’ve got two sidebar widgets – one for listing the series titles (in a naff field, but it’s better than nothing), and another for the stories/posts IN that series.

And the angels cried a long word starting with “H” and all seemed peachy.

There is only one small issue, but I’ve left an enhancement request with the lovely French gent – a way to manually determine the order of the posts/stories in the Series.

But this is a minor issue for a single reason: The plugin just works. It’s not got tons of wordpress code to deal with. There’s plenty of UI, and it even works with the TinyMCE plugin (which I’m about to install)…

Now I can sleep well — another achievement… achieved with the help of plugin developers.

Read DaisyDonnie on your mobile

You can read DaisyDonnie easily on your Mobile Phone, now I’ve installed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin! It makes the site less colourful, but a lot easier to read on your phone.