Blog Indexes
An index? Indexes are for books, right? But I rather think they are useful for blogs also. When I started blogging at the end of May I never dreamed I would need such a thing. But 175 rickety posts later an index would seem to be a useful addition. I haven’t noticed many blogs that have an index but there is a WordPress plugin that takes care of the construction exceedingly well.
The AZIndex Plugin
The AZIndex Plugin for WordPress by English Mike is a flexible WordPress plugin for generating alphabetical indexes of your weblog’s posts. According to English Mike you can:
Enhance your WordPress blog by creating multiple, three-level alphabetical indexes of your posts based on any combination of post title, author, extract, or custom fields of your choice. Select which posts are included in your indexes using a combination of categories and tags, display them in up to four columns on a single page or over multiple pages.
Plugin Settings
I installed the plugin and these are the settings (located under the “Manage” tag) I chose:
Index name: Index (This shows up in my theme in the horizontal menu below the banner)
Included/excluded categories: — (I left this blank)
Included/excluded tags: — (I left this blank)
Index headings: Title
Index subheadings: none
Description: Excerpt (Add a few sentences in your “Excerpt” field when you write your post)
Number of columns: 1 (I have some long titles so I went for one column)
Next I checked off the options that I wanted:
Include child categories: —
Include blog pages: — (I didn’t want some of my pages listed so I left this unchecked)
Exclude blog posts (i.e. only include blog pages): —
Use multiple pages: —
Display page links above the index (default): —
Display page links below the index: —
Group items with the same heading under one main entry: — (When I tried this the titles lost their hyper-links so I left it unchecked)
Display alphabetical headings: Checked
Display an alphabetical heading at the start of every page: Checked
Display an alphabetical heading at the start of every column: —
Insert a gap between entries beginning with a different character: Checked
Display alphabetical links above the index: Checked
Include unused characters in the alphabetical links: —
Use two rows for the alphabetical links: —
Ignore specified characters, like quotes, when sorting the index: Checked
Put entries starting with non-alphanumeric characters at the end of the index: Checked
I didn’t use any of the advanced options but there were two more settings:
Heading separator: — (I wasn’t using subheadings so I left this blank)
Ignore these characters when sorting: “‘ (These characters were entered automatically when I checked “Ignore specified characters, like quotes, when sorting the index”)
Automated Index
When I clicked on “Save Changes” a page called “Index” was created. From now on each post will be added automatically to the index. It looks great and will be very functional, especially if I fill in all the excerpts for each post — but don’t hold your breath on that getting completed any time soon. It will be interesting to see if anyone actually finds the index useful — apart from me. I think it is a fabulous addition thanks to Mike. English Mike also has an AZIndex User Extensions plugin which you can check to see if it is out of development.
This really is great info, Keep up the great posts!
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