WordPress for Storytellers: Themes and Plugins
WordPress is my platform of choice to build websites and publish stories. I often get asked by writers what themes and plugins I recommend for storytelling, and although that list changes frequently, I do have some favorites. Here they are:
Themes for Storytelling
The Erudite is the theme I used for The Miracle in July (hacked all the hell to make it do my bidding). It makes good use of whitespace so that the focus is on the story, not the jazz-hands design of the website. Free.
http://somadesign.ca/projects/the-erudite/
The Novelist is a premier portfolio theme for authors and/or copy writers that mimics a page-turning book and has outstanding typography capabilities. (Hat tip to ZeroStrategist) $35
http://themeforest.net/item/the-novelist-responsive-wp-theme-for-writers/526345
BONUS: Although PressBooks is still in alpha/beta and not really a theme (it's a multi-site/multi-author platform) you should know about it anyway. Using the power of WordPress, PressBooks lets you easily write and output books in multiple formats such as epub, Kindle, print-on-demand-ready PDF, HTML and inDesign-ready XML. Sign up for an account and see what I mean. Free (for now).
Plugins for Storytelling
The Web Fiction Table of Contents plugin is a sidebar widget that generates a TOC from a category of posts in chronological order. Free.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/web-fiction-table-of-contents-widget/
The Organize Series plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/chapters/posts you write as part of a series. Use this plugin with the Organize Series Publisher plugin for easy bulk publishing of all articles/chapters/posts in a series all at once.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/organize-series/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/organize-series-publisher/faq/
Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that grabs posts from your WordPress blog, imports feeds from external sites, or creates new content then outlines, orders, and edits your work to craft it into a single volume for export in several formats such as PDF, ePUB, TEI.
Do you have WordPress themes and plugins to recommend that are good for writers publishing their work online? Please leave a comment and let us know. We're all in this together, yo.
XO
