I like Simple Tags. I still use it. The stuff in the above post only alerts people to my experience using it.

By the way - I have since come to realize that the related posts problems are not unique to Simple Tags. Relating posts is basically impossible to do well. I have tried many plugins and they all fail. I even tried to help a programmer write one that would work correctly. That was not successful either.

The only “Related Posts” plugin that I think would work correctly is one that simply provides a form in the WP admin write post panel that displays a suggested list of related posts, but then allows you to choose which of them you want to attach. Any that rely on automatic relating of tags, keywords, or even full text scans, are doomed to fail most of the time. There are just too many completely unrelated posts on any blog that have in common some of the same tags, keywords, or words in the post text.

-Will

Yes, the API can be limited and difficult to understand, but no one said anything about multiple new releases per week. In fact, the post was fairly understanding about the difficulties of writing and maintaining a plugin.

I prefer people who submit bugs

Apparently not, since Will did submit the bug and he wrote this post in response to emails he received after submitting it.

After, many bugs of Simple Tags result from limitation of the API Taxonomy…

It is easy to criticize… I prefer people who submit bugs and patchs, has people who writes crap post…

with my cross-references plugin you can do “what” you want to, but not “the way” you want to. You can define that post A is related to post B, and you get A and B at each others list of “related posts”. The related posts lists are not automatically but manually generated, you have total control over them.

When you edit A you set a reference to B appending “[ cref.from B ]” to the text. But you cannot choose B from a list of suggestions (as you would like to), you must write the post ID number. You can get the ID for a given post at the dashboard under manage / posts.

Someone with PHP programming skills could extend my plugin in order to choose the related posts from a list the way you propose. I do not plan to do this myself. If someone wants to do that, she or he can contact me to discuss the technical details.

What I plan to do is this: 1. extend my plugin to work not only with the post ID but also with the post slug, for example you could relate to this post with [ cref.from simple-tags-wordpress-plugin ]. 2. show a list of a few last visited posts, so that one could set a reference to it with copy paste. The development has already begun (if you are a programmer you can check the development version of the plugin at the wordpress.org plugin home), it will be ready probably on the next few months.

-Will

As far as In Series goes: the behavior I think you’re looking for (linking posts to an arbitrary number of related posts, with each post getting a different list of outgoing links) is not what the plugin was meant to do. It’s really tuned towards grouping a sequence of related posts.

You can take off the numbered formatting, and put your explicitly related posts together into a series, but the “related post” list will be identical for every post in the series. That might work for you for now, but I can imagine that eventually your “related posts” lists will probably start to get unpleasantly long, and contain more and more tangentially related things.

I appreciate the mention in any case — I’m glad to hear my plugin is getting suggested. You might try out the Cross References Plugin instead — it looks like it’s closer to what you want.

-Will