Blog sequencing

  • phillro

    (@phillro)


    16 years, 7 months ago

    Can I provide the reader with “paths” through my blog? What I want to do is to suggest to the reader, quite visibly, that if he/she has just read blog x, then blog q might be a sensible one to read next, rather than going serially on to blog y. In fact, what I would like to be able to do is to say to the reader: “If you are interested in topic A, then I suggest you read in the sequence x, q, r, s, f ….; but if you are interested in topic B, then I suggest you read in a different sequence x, y, j, k, l”

    I am a new user, coming to WordPress from simpler Blog software, in the hope of being able to add this functionality.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • stvwlf

    (@stvwlf)

    16 years, 7 months ago

    If you want the list of posts to be automatically generated by WordPress, look at this
    plugin http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/
    There are other, similar ones also.

    If you mean you want to hand generate the list of sensible posts for each new post you write, so you are in control of the suggestions, yes that can be done. It requires a bit of custom code added to the footer of each post. My first thought would be to add the list of posts as a comma separated list of post id’s as a custom field on each post, and add some code to look up the custom field when the post displays, and display the list of suggested posts below it. Possibly there is a plugin that does that but probably not. You’d need help with the code but its not very difficult. Post back if this seems like a workable approach.

    Thread Starter phillro

    (@phillro)

    16 years, 7 months ago

    Thanks for the input.

    I looked at the plug-in you referred to. It says “adds the related posts to feed”. I do not think that will serve me in the way I want. What you are suggesting may be better, but I am keen to make it as simple as I can – I am a real beginner here. I guess that if I could just put at the end of each blog a message that says something like “If you are interested in X, why don’t you read blog J next.”

    Is there a simple way to do that manually, so that clicking on J takes you to blog J. The next level of sophistication is, I think, what your suggestions offers – the links like J, etc, are maintained automatically as I expand the whole blog, and I can maintain a list of “themes” like X (it will be a short list). Am I right – am I properly understanding what your suggestion will enable?

    Minor question about terminology. Is the whole thing a blog, consisting of multiple entries? Or is each entry a blog?

    stvwlf

    (@stvwlf)

    16 years, 7 months ago

    If you are doing this manually, why not just add the
    “If you are interested in X, why don’t you read blog J next.” to the end of each post by making it part of the post content? If you want the message to look differently than the rest of the post you can wrap the message in between a <div id=”interested”></div> and assign styling in the stylesheet like
    #interested { background-color: #123456; font-size: 20px; }

    Once you get the message down you can copy and paste it into the end of each post. That would be the simplest way to go.

    Many people call each entry a blog but I think that’s confusing terminology. In WordPress we’d probably call it a post. The whole site would be the blog.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The topic ‘Blog sequencing’ is closed to new replies.