Update: Series design has changed since this was posted, but details of the post are still accurate.
This is a funny one.
This functionality was built at the model layer forever ago, but in search of the right user experience, we never fully shipped it. The basic feature actually existed when I was working on dev.to solo if I remember correctly.
The functionality I speak of is the ability for folks to create "series" of posts.
Here's an example of a series post (linked manually by admins)
Screenshot:
Now you can create your own series. If you're using "v1" of the editor, you can add series: to the frontmatter. Give the same series name to any post that should appear in the feature.
If you're using "v2 beta", you can add the series name in a slightly more UI-visible way.
Related:
You may agree with me that this is not the universe's most user-friendly way to manage this, but I decided this just shouldn't keep waiting forever. Had to ship something.
This was definitely shipped quite hastily once I got the itch. Moving fast, break all the things. As it were.
So if you have a series of posts which naturally follow one another. Feel free to add them to a series now. This has not been thoroughly tested. If you run into a bug, feel free to raise an issue, or even submit a PR. No pressure 😄
Happy coding ❤️
Top comments (28)
This is so wonderful, got my Orchid Tutorials series all wired up in just seconds!
I don't know if it received additional work with this new feature but thanks to the builtins prefetching capabilities of dev.to switching from one article to the next in your series is basically istantaneous.
So cool!
Don’t forget the edge-caching! Most requests served pre-gzipped from a node near you. 🤗
wonders of fastly?
Wonders of leaning on Fastly, I’d say. It’s not something you can plug in without a lot of intentionality and trade offs.
Fastly’s been great but Cloudflare and others are doing really cool things. Definitely an exciting space.
Looks great!
How can you ensure proper order of posts in a list? I have posted a 5 part series, and part 5 shows up before part 4, even though I posted them in the correct order.
Looks cool!
I see the case for not wanting the picker at the top not to take up too much vertical space, but I think having the "episode" titles more clearly visible might still be useful when you're looking for a specific topic.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, definitely interested in exploring possible ways to adjust the design. It's the most nimble part of the whole thing.
At the very least it could be simple enough to add title attributes plus screen-reader cues.
What about doing something authors are currently already doing, and prepending something like this to the post?
maybe with a little bit of fancy styling.
Is there a non-screen reader way to see the title attribute on mobile devices?
Nope.
At the moment it's fully just dots.
But definitely open to adjustments here (not just saying this to be conciliatory, I feel like it should probably be adjusted)
I think you can do something like Wikipedia's Contents block. User can hide/expand it.
Quoting Young Frankestein: Alive! It's alive!
Thanks!
Amazing!
I gave it a try on a former series and it seems to be working like a charm, thanks!
Unrelated question.... how did you create the table of contents in your posts?
How to Manage the TOC of Articles on dev.to?
🇫🇷 Boris Jamot
Magic. I wasn’t looking hard enough.
Thanks so much :)
I don't understand the feature. If I look into this article:
dev.to/raulavila/multithreading-in...
There is nothing related to a series. Where is the difference to not using the "series" tag?
🙌🙌🙌🙌
So excited about this!
Easy peasy japanesey! I converted my JSON post into 'json-helpful-tips' series:
How to create properties from variables in JSON (Part 1)
Camilo Martinez
How to make CRUD operations in JSON (Part 2)
Camilo Martinez
Awesome!
I'm debating using a series vs a tag for devrel posts. The content are all around devrel, so a tag makes sense. But they also could be read in succession as they all relate - so a series makes sense.
Do you have any thoughts on what might be better for the reader?
I don't know if anyone else does this but I have an index page links to all the articles in the correct order.
Adventures of a Hobbyist ~ Index
Andrew Bone
Would it, therefore, make sense to allow people to specify an index page that the "series" tag can link to?
This is so useful! Thank you for working on it.
Is the order in which the series of posts are linked together determined by the date the post was created, published, something else?