Creating and linking chapter pages

  • Resolved Tikatu

    (@tikatu)


    11 years, 6 months ago

    Okay, using the TwentyEleven theme here. Fair warning, I am an absolute NOOB about php.

    I’m trying to move my fiction archive into a WordPress build that will eventually become my author platform. Because of this, I have a blog embedded, too.

    I’ve been trying to figure out which way to go with my multi-chapter stories. I’ve used pages for the one-shots–that’s easy peasy. But some of my stories have multiple chapters and it seems the way to go on those is with posts. Problem is: I don’t want them ending up in the blog. I’d rather use pages, but the issue there is creating an easy way to navigate through them.

    Right now, I have a parent level on my navigation bar, a sub-level according to what size/kind of story it is, i.e.: One-shot, short story, drabbles and poetry, or novel. Each title would be under their respective type, and chapters beneath that.

    Is there a plug-in I can use to make this easier? So far, all the plug-ins I’ve seen tell me they’ve not been tested in the latest version of WordPress, so I’m leery of installing them. Plus, a lot of them require some kind of php and as I said, total noob.

    Thanks in advance.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • The idea of posts is that they’re ordered by date. So they only work well for novels if you write your chapters in sequence. Regular readers will see the latest chapter at the top, which makes sense in a way. But new readers will see the chapters in reverse order, which makes no sense at all.

    Pages provide a more flexible solution, because you can control the sequence more easily. I’d make a Table of Contents page for each “book”, whether poetry, short stories or novel, instead of using the WordPress menus.

    Plugins can change all this, of course. Older plugins are worth a try. Unless they’re very old it’s very likely that they still work. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plugin that requires knowledge of PHP.

    Thread Starter Tikatu

    (@tikatu)

    Thanks, Rod, for your input. Most of this stuff is already written–I’m moving it to WordPress to consolidate my presence as a writer. I can upload a lot of it in reverse order, so the first chapter is the first one that appears. It’s the works that are unfinished, and any future multi-chapter stories, I need to worry about.

    There are a couple of plug-ins that look promising. I may try one or more of them out.

    Anyone have more advice? I’m open to it!

    Thread Starter Tikatu

    (@tikatu)

    Okay. Here’s what I have so far.

    I’m using the “Stealth Publish” plug-in to keep pages from appearing in any feeds. I thought this might also keep the chapters from appearing in the page bar but that’s not happening. The story title “landing page” will have links using “a href” to the various chapters and I’ve written code that will add a “next chapter/previous chapter” to the end of each chapter.

    Right now, the page drop down looks like this:
    Tikatu’s Corner — top level
      Story type — child page
       Story title — grandchild page (landing page)
        Chapter 1 — great-grandchild page
        Chapter 2 — great-grandchild page

    I would prefer to have the landing page be the primary “portal” to the stories. One of the novels has 80 chapters; for that to become a drop-down from the page bar is pretty idiotic, as seen above. Plus, a reader can click on the next link in line to the last chapter they previously read. It will likely be a big help in allowing readers to keep track where they’ve been. Very important in that long novel as all the chapter titles begin with “Un”…

    So, any ideas how I can do this? Can I use an exclusion? If so, where would I put it? I thought about making the Tikatu’s Corner page a showcase page and use the pages widget on it but all that did was showcase my BLOG posts, which is not what I want. (Though I wouldn’t mind doing that for the blog itself… hmm.) There is a plug-in that might help with the issue of having all the pages showing in a list, but it seems most of the widgets end up on the blog page, too.

    Thread Starter Tikatu

    (@tikatu)

    I actually found a plug-in that does this for me!! It’s called WP Hide Post. It allows me to change the visibility of a page and yet I can still get to it via a link! Sweet!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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