Summary

The Issue Manager plugin allows for batch publishing of "issues". It allows you to publish and unpublish articles written with the same category all at the same time, including allowing the admin to order the articles as desired before publishing. In InfoTech Tuesday, this is used to publish the issues of the newsletter each week.

Use

In order to use this plugin to publish the weekly newsletter, each article for the week's issue must be categorized as "this week". When ready to publish, go to Posts > Issues. Once there, there will be a single category listed "this week". Beside it will be three options, "Ignore", "Unpublish", and "Publish".

Simply click "Publish", at which time you will be taken to a new page to order the posts.

Put the posts in the desired order, alter the publish time to the desired time, and click "Publish Issue". (Note: this process may have to be repeated in order to yield the right order - see Bugs)

Bugs

There is an unresolved bug with this plugin. When publishing an issue, the plugin often reverses the publishing order of the articles. When this happens, the admin has to go back in and unpublish and republish the issue. The second time, the order persists and publishes accurately. This is a but in the plugin that is awaiting a plugin update.

Also note, unpublishing any of the persistent categories in InfoTech Tuesday will result in those articles no longer appearing on the site and ultimately no longer being published accurately with their appropriate issues. The plugin has been modified for InfoTech Tuesday so that this is not possible via the admin interface. However, should the plugin be updated or the interface changed, this is a legitimate concern.

Upgrade

There is one modification to this plugin which changes the admin view so that only the "this issue" category shows. This was done to eliminate the possibility of accidently unpublishing categories. In the im_admin_main.php file within the plugin directory, there is a simple if-statement inserted into the foreach logic that would ordinarily iterate through all the categories in order to display them all. The if-statement just says only to proceed if the category ID == 243, the ID number for the category "this issue".

After adjusting the updated plugin to only display one category, this plugin can be updated by deactivating, replacing the files with the upgrade, and reactivating.