Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/creating-a-post-series-plugin-for-wordpress/
A WordPress Post Series plugin enables you to organize your posts serially to create a book or a course. It provides users a path for learning. Posts series plugins can also be used to split a long post into multiple parts.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a plugin for displaying a series of posts. You can also integrate the same code into a theme, as theme functionality.
Taxonomies Versus Post Series
In WordPress, taxonomies are used to group or organize similar posts together. But WordPress doesn’t provide a way to display all the posts of a particular taxonomy in a customized, serial manner. WordPress taxonomies are displayed using an archive.php file, so we cannot create a post series as a single, indexable post.
So we need a post series, which is actually one post that contains other posts in a serial manner.
How to Create a Post Series
There are many different ways to create a post series. Popular post series plugins found at WordPress.org use custom taxonomies on WordPress posts to create a post series, but in this tutorial I’ll use Custom Post Types instead.
Plugin File Structure
Create a plugin directory named sitepoint-post-series and place two files in this, named sitepoint-post-series.php and sitepoint-post-series.css.