English Mike

(Note: The AZIndex User Guide is a work in progress.  I will continue to add sections as I write them, but it could be some time before the guide is complete.)

Introduction

AZIndex is a highly flexible plugin designed to make it easy for blog owners to create good-looking alphabetical indexes for their blog posts and pages.  The plugin lets you create indexes in just a few clicks of a mouse button, but it can also do a whole lot more.  AZIndex makes a large number of options available for fine tuning the look and feel of an index.

For example, If you regularly post reviews of some kind — e.g. movie reviews, album reviews, book reviews, etc. — along with your other blogging, then with a small amount of extra effort, you can create alphabetical indexes of those reviews.  You can also display your reviews’ ratings or perhaps add a short summary of each review right there in the index.  And you’re not restricted to just one index per blog — so, if you are writing book reviews, you can create one index based on the titles of the books and another indexed by the names of the authors, optionally grouping all the titles by the same author together under the same heading.  Best of all, when you add your next review, as long as you tag or categorize it correctly, the index will be updated automatically.  So once you have set up an index, it will just about take care of itself.

The goal of the AZIndex User Guide is to help you get the most out of using the AZIndex plugin.  Along with some introductory tutorials for new users, the guide explains in depth how each of the settings in the AZIndex administration panel affects the appearance and operation of an index.

There are a large number of options for fine tuning the look and feel of your indexes, and all that choice can seem a little overwhelming at first.  If you are unfamiliar with the plugin, or are fairly new to WordPress blogging in general, I would suggest you begin with the Getting Started section below and work through the tutorials on how to use AZIndex.  If you’re just looking for more detailed information on individual settings, then feel free to skip to the Reference Section later in the guide (available at a later date).

Installing the AZIndex Plugin

Installing the AZIndex plugin is very straightforward:

1. Download the latest version of the AZIndex Plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory and unzip it.
2. Upload all the contents (including the azindex directory), into your WordPress installation’s plugin directory.  This is usually …/wordpress/wp-content/plugins.
   • Hint: If you haven’t done so already, you should seriously consider installing and using the One-Click Plugin Updater plugin.  It makes installing all plugins, including AZIndex, much easier.
3. From the Plugin Management administration page, click the Activate link next to AZIndex and the plugin will be activated.

Tutorial: Getting Started with AZIndex

Let’s start off with something easy, and something that many blog owners might want to do — create an alphabetical index of all the posts on their blog:

1. Go to the AZIndex administration page (found under Manage >> AZIndexes).  If this is the first time you have used the plugin, the page will be almost empty since you haven’t created any indexes yet.
2. Click on the (add new) link to begin creating an index.
3. Since we’re just creating a basic index of all the posts in your blog, the only thing you have to do is enter a name for the index.  For this example we will use “Index of Posts” but you can name it anything you like.  Type the name into the Index name field at the top of the page.
4. Now scroll to all the way to the bottom of the page (ignoring all the other settings for now) and click the Add Index button. 
5. You have now created your first index!  The index you just created is now listed in the table on the main AZIndexes administration page.
6. So let’s go and take a look at the index.  When you created the index, AZIndex also created a blog page for displaying the index and set its title the name you gave the index.  Go to Manage >> Pages and look for the blog page with the title “Index of Posts” (or whatever you called it).
7. Edit the page and you will see something like this: [az-index id="1"].  This is called a WordPress shortcode, which is the way WordPress gives plugins a chance to insert content into blog posts and pages.  The tag az-index identifies the shortcode as belonging to the AZIndex plugin, and id=”1″ tells AZIndex to add the index that has the id of 1 to the page.  (The index ids are shown in the table on the administration page).
8. You can add any other text you like to the page.  For example, you might want to add a short description of the index, such as “Here is an index of all the posts in my blog:“  Just be careful not to alter the shortcode itself.
9. Once you have added all the extra wording you want, click Save then click Preview this Post.
10. The preview will display the index.  True, it’s not very exciting to look at right now, but it does display an alphabetical list of links to all the published posts in your blog.

So, now that we have an index to play with, why don’t we try and smarten it up a little.  If you can, keep the preview of the index open in your browser so that you can quickly see the results of the changes you make to the index settings.

1. Open another browser tab or window and go back to Manage >> AZIndexes.
2. Click the Edit link next to the index you created and you will return to the settings page for the index.
3. Skip down the page until you get to Number of columns field and change that setting to 2.
4. Now move on to the Options section and select the following two options:
   • Display alphabetical headings
   • Insert a gap between entries beginning with a different character
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Settings and you will be returned to the main AZIndex administration page.
6. Now switch back to the index preview web page you left open and refresh the page (Ctrl-R).
7. Lo and behold!  You have a two column index and each section beginning with a different letter has a nice new alphabetical heading.

Now, what if you have a large number of posts in your blog?  Displaying an index with 500 items on single page isn’t a very user friendly thing to do.  The page may take a long time to load and users may have to scroll a long way to get to the part of the index they want.  But we can fix this by changing a couple of extra settings, so let’s go back to the index settings page to make those changes:

1. Go back to Manage >> AZIndexes and click the Edit link next to your index.
2. Skip to the Options section and this time, select two different options:
   • Use multiple pages
   • Display alphabetical links above the index
3. When you click the Use multiple pages option, you may notice another settings field appearing at the bottom of the page called Number of items per page.  Not surprisingly, this is where you can set the number of index items you want to appear on each page of the index.
4. Set this to somewhere between 10 and 50 depending on how many posts you have in your blog.  You don’t want each index page to have too many items, but you also don’t want your index to have too many pages, so choose a number that strikes a balance between the two.
5. Click Save Settings and switch back to the preview page and refresh it again (Ctrl-R) to see the results of your latest changes.

As long as your blog has more than a handful of posts, the index will now be spread over multiple pages and page links will be displayed above the index allowing the user to navigate through the pages.  Below the page links you will also see alphabetical links.  This makes it easy for users to jump directly to any letter in the index at the click of a mouse button.

So now you know how to create an alphabetical index of posts in your blog, how to change the index settings, and how to quickly preview those changes.  If that’s all you need, then once you’re happy with the way the index looks, then all that’s left to do is publish the page your index is on and your readers will have an index of your blog posts to use and admire.

However, you will have noticed that AZIndex has a bundle of other settings we haven’t talked about yet.  The next section of this guide will introduce you to some of them and the interesting things you can do with them.

(To be continued…)