A Related Posts for WordPress plugin allows you to manually select and link different posts to each other. By default, the most you can do to group a set of posts on a given topic is to create a Category. The Category definitely groups all of the posts in that category together but only as one long sequential list of blog posts. Not very friendly and very time consuming if you are trying to find posts that might be part of a series such as Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc. And, you probably want an easy way to direct readers of one post to similar articles of interest in different parts of your site.
Enter the “Related Posts for WordPress Plugin.” This plugin does exactly what it says: it allows you to manually select Posts from anywhere in your site and have the Post Titles with Links appear underneath the Current Post as “Related Posts.” If you look at JasonPalmer.com, “Google SiteMap Generator for WordPress” and scroll down to the bottom of the page you will see an additional heading, “Other related stories…”, the Related Posts for WordPress Plugin displays the titles of other posts with links. You can rename this heading anything you like. The default heading title is “Related Posts.”
Optionally, although I think it makes the display too busy, you can also include each Posts “Featured Image” a.k.a. thumbnail (assuming you created one for the post you are referring to), and specify the image placement in relation to the title.
A useful feature is to make the Related Posts “reciprocal.” That means that for each post you reference on the current article, the current article will be listed as a related post at the bottom of the one you linked. Using my example above, “Google SiteMap Generator for WordPress”, if you click on the related post, “Google WebMaster Tools”, you will see at the bottom of the post the reciprocal link back to the original article, “Google SiteMap Generator for WordPress.”
Other options include the ability to determine the order in which your Related Posts appear. You can manually set the order or you can display the posts automatically by date order or alphabetically, or randomly. The last two options for this particular Related Posts for WordPress plugin allow you to set if both Posts and Pages can have Related Posts, and if you mix your Related Posts and Pages, do you want one list for the Related Posts and a separate one for the Pages or do you want them combined.
JasonPalmer.com uses the Related Posts for WordPress plugin from MicroKid.
Visit the Official MicroKid Site at:
http://www.microkid.net/wordpress/related-posts
Visit Related Posts for WordPress plugin from MicroKid at WordPress.org:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/microkids-related-posts
Leave a Reply