Choosing the number of related posts

Hey,

thanks for the compliments and for reaching out to us.

The plugin you are using automatically finds and inserts related posts based on the headline and the tags in the post. There is some black magic involved, however this black magic works best for English and I’m quite sure it doesn’t understand French, especially not French word games and unfortunately neither do I. I’m sorry about that.

As you already figured out the “number of posts to display” in plugin’s settings applies to all posts and cannot be set per post. “Edit Posts” is there for you to manually replace any of the otherwise automatically inserted related (or in your case not-so-related) posts with one of your choice. If you insert only a few posts and leave other slots empty, they will be filled automatically. Right now we don’t have plans to add a setting per post…

Well, there is no way to pick up related posts before publish, because they are added on publish, but you can first publish privately, edit related posts and then publish the post publicly.

We have another plugin (Editorial Assistant) that lets you manually insert related content before you publish. It works in a slightly different way and it also suggest posts from other (English) bloggers in our network, but you can always insert content only from your own blog. But again… it works best with English. You might give it a try though.

Let me know if you have any other questions or if you need any kind of assistance — I’ll gladly help.

Have a good weekend | Bon week-end
Mateja

Thank you so much Mateja for your complete and rich answer. I will definitely try the Editoria Assistant plugin.

Nevertheless, I do think that users should decide how many related posts they want to display. Why not use the default number unless I drag&drop specific posts in the thumbnail spaces. In the latter case, each time I do a manual insert of posts in the thumbnails, then it should switch to manual, i.e. not automatically add undesired posts to complete the list. I think this doesn’t have to do anything with language. It just offers more control to the user.

Another option would consist in adding a checkbox “Check if you only want to see the posts you added”, in the edit interface. If checked, then it won’t automatically fill the empty thumbnails with other posts.

Have you explored these possibilities?

As a former geek, I don’t see why this should raise complex issues in the coding… maybe I don’t see it right.

Best regards,

Jean-Fran?ois

Hey Jean-Fran?ois, sorry for the late reply & big thanks for your valuable feedback! We do appreciate it, really!

To be perfectly honest, we have thought about these (and many other) possibilities before, but in order not to over-bloat our plugin with too many excessive features, we initially just skimmed it down to the basic ones. After that, we carefully started to add other ones, one by one, while carefully observing how they are interacted with, which ones are popular and which ones obsolete.

But as I said before, we do appreciate your feedback and we will mention your idea when planning our future possibilities. Hopefully, it’ll be granted and developed to it’s release.

Either way — I’ll keep you updated! As should you, if you have any more questions or any other similar ideas, since we’ll gladly hear you out!

Take care & have a nice weekend ahead!

Best,
Silvo

Hi Silvo,

Again, a deep thank for a complete and motivated answer. I have no doubt you have explored this possibility and made choices. How could you not? ?? I know what it means to build software, to organize priorities, to deal with endlessly growing lists of things to fix and so on. And I also know that evolution comes from voices of users, hence the reason why I added mine in the list.

BTW I love what you guys to at Zemanta and I think you have huge potential (I myself work in the field of collective intelligence). Have you heard about eCairn?

Best regards,

Jean-Fran?ois

Hey Jean-Fran?ois, glad we can communicate so openly as well & we couldn’t agree with you more! You seem to understand the work flow of small start-up companies, which we respect & appreciate.

Couldn’t say I heard about it before, but I did take take a look at your site and it certainly looks intriguing (and ambitious). I hope & wish all the best for you as well, since this is all the feedback I can give you right now.

As always — you are more than welcome to leave us any kind of feedback in the future, or ping us if something (by any chance!) goes wrong. We’re here to help!

Take care & enjoy the weekend!

Best
Silvo

Hi Silvo,

Thank you so much for your feedback. As for my site, I just began the process of a complete redesign yesterday, so lot’s of things will change in the next few days and weeks. And soon our research institute will have its own website too.

Tell me if you have heard about eCairn.

All the best,

Jean-Fran?ois