ideas on listing back catalogue of magazine issues?

Hi all,

I’m looking for ideas on listing back catalogue of magazine issues. We are using the newspaper theme. Our development site is not live.

We’ve imported our back catalogue of article posts into our wordpress database, in over 1000 issues, into Newspaper. (29,000 articles). They are tagged “issue xxxx” (from 140 to 1141). They display wonderfully.

Going forward, future issues are no problem at all. We’ll create a nice looking page for each weekly issue set of posts, so that it can carry specials, highlights, etc. Flexblocks filtered by category and tag. Very neat, easy to copy forward, just change the tag slug, content flows in, nice work guys! And we can add that page ID to a backissues page flexblock filter and that will be easy.

I can’t manually do this for the back catalogue though.

We can display each issue via the tag template page, although it would be prettier for us if the template did not put “Tag” in the title before the tag name. I guess this will need a child php file or something.

But I can’t find a good way to create a back issue catalogue with a link to each of these tag templates for each issue.

I’d ideally like a flexblock type display, or something, to display each tag, organised by the latest issue, with pagination. But the links must be to the tag listing, not to an article within the tag.

Is this possible?

Using posts: I could create a post for each issue with a listing on it, which I have in html for each issue already and could import to wp_posts. I could then do a single flexblock filtered by postID, with a comma separated list of posts. I’d limit the list to 50 issues per year and create a page for each year, so I’m assuming a flexblock can take a list of 50 post IDs.

But that would not be as pretty as linking to the newspaper theme tag template.

“Categories/tag list” block: at a pinch that would do, but it is much less decorative than the original at https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issueindex/index. It doesn’t know the title of each issue, date, etc. Would need to add custom fields somehow I guess – using a plugin – wonder if that would work? And would prefer to carry a pic wit each issue…

Any thoughts welcome on the best route. Sure I am missing something obvious.

Thanks!

Thanks Bettina. Could I ask, what is the function of the blocks’ Category filter option “Single – related from tags”? I can’t find much mention of this option in the documentation, and not sure what it does, and the other related options.
Cheers
Pete

Thank you.

So, does the block Category filter option “Single – related from tags” just mean that you can select this option if you enter a value in the “Filter by tag slug”?

If I set a Filter by tag slug I usually leave the Category filter as “All categories” and it is fine. Perhaps I am missing something, or am I being pedantic (my usual failing).

Perhaps it is only there as a guide?

But I am not sure I properly understand all the “Single-xxx” options in the Category filer pull down list

I only ask as I want to know about every functionality – I find more options all the time.

Thank you Bettina, I will look into this further to understand it, as my test following your example seemed no different than to select <all categories>. I am missing something.

But changing the subject back to my original post, it appears that I can import html from our client’s huge back catalogue into the WordPress database to create pages (as opposed to posts) without the risk of losing the input if edited with tagdiv if I add the tagdiv code for column text to both ends.

For example:

insert the following into the wp_posts “post_content” field:

[tdc_zone type=”tdc_content”][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][tdb_title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

<div align=”center”>

<div></div>

</div>
.
.
. [more html here]
.
.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][/tdc_zone]

This appears robust. Would you agree? Is there a limit to the text size that the tag div editor can cope with? I would prefer my issue content pages to be pages rather than posts for consistency.

And final question, Is there a limit to the number of Post IDs I can add into the flexblock post ID filter?

Many thanks for all your help.

Thanks!