Write excerpts, tag, and categorize your pages

WordPress excerpts are an underused but powerful feature that allow you to explain to your readers why they should read the page you wrote. Tagging and categorization of pages help improve the findability of those pages, especially in search engines. Native WordPress doesn’t support excerpts, tags, or categories for pages, but bSuite does. Whenever you edit a page you’ll see the same tools that you do when writing posts.

Automatically insert anchors in your page

There’s nothing wrong with long pages, but you can make it easier for your readers to navigate them by if you break it up into sections. When you use the innerindex shortcode, bSuite will insert an automatically index of all the headings (the h1 through h6 tags) in your page. This also works in regular blog posts.

Automatically list sub-pages

You can easily organize pages into any structure that suits your content, but having to manually manage all the links into that hierarchy can be tiresome. The list_pages shortcode solves that in a jiffy. Options to the shortcode allow you to set how deep the list is and other features.

Automatically list sub-pages with excerpts

One especially useful feature of the list_pages shortcode is the ability to include the excerpt from each of the listed pages. You can even put the innerindex shortcode in the excerpt (see that at work here).

[[pageindex]]

About

“Blogging” typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress’s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex.

It’s a WordPress Plugin that puts named anchors on all of the <h1>, <h2>, <h*>-tagged content, and builds a list of links to those anchors that can be inserted anywhere on the page. An example can be seen in this post, and in the old bstat Beta 4 announcement.

Usage

Step 1
Write a post or page as usual, inserting <h*> tags where you normally would.

Step 2
Add this token somewhere in your page or post: [[pageindex]] That token will be replaced with the generated index. Why not just insert the index at the top of the page? Because it’s your document and you might want to put it elsewhere, like after the introduction or executive summary. But just remember to insert the token, because it won’t put the index anywhere if you don’t.

Installation

Step 1
Download: bsuite_innerindex.zip

Step 2
place unzipped “ bsuite_innerindex.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.

Notes & Caveats

This is the first beta release of this plugin. I don’t see how it could break anything, but what do I know. Don’t blame me for loss, damage, or bad presidents. Please report bugs and/or suggestions in the comments.

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