As for your second point, I agree that the outline-structure is an organizational tool for me, the writer/site manager, and not something that affects the reader/user. The main benefit of the hierarchical structure is that if I drag-and-drop a parent chapter to a new location in my list of chapters, all the child chapters automatically follow it. This is a very helpful feature… but not worth messing up menu_order, I guess.

Well okay. Thanks for responding. It helped to be able to bounce ideas off you. I’ll poke around a bit more for a post ordering plugin that preserves menu_order, or else I’ll just flatten out the chapter structure and ditch the hierarchy.

$class = $r['class'];
$anchor = '<a href="'.get_permalink($post).'" class="'.$class.'" rel="'.$rel.'"'.$tooltip.'>';$tooltip.’>’;

`
$class = $r['class'];
$anchor = ‘‘;
`

I would also ask, do you really need a hierarchical structure for the book chapters? You might say, “it is supposed to be like an outline,” but an outline is primarily an organizational tool for writers. Most printed books are laid out in a purely linear format — page 1 to page 200, with every chapter and subsection on the same “level”, and read sequentially. I don’t really see any navigational benefit to having the chapters in a hierarchy, especially considering some chapters have subsections and some don’t, which makes the hierarchical organization inconsistent and potentially confusing.

I have a hierarchical custom post type (Chapters), and I use the plug-in called Simple Page Ordering to help re-order my posts. Simple Page Ordering works just like other page ordering plugins that you mention in the documentation.

Let’s say that I have several chapters in a hierarchical structure, where some “parent” chapters have “children” chapters. The problem is that menu_order is set depending on the hierarchical level, like so:

* Chapter 1 (menu_order == 0)
* Chapter 1.1 (menu_order == 0)
* Chapter 1.2 (menu_order == 1)
* Chapter 1.3 (menu_order == 2)
* Chapter 1.4 (menu_order == 3)
* Chapter 2 (menu_order == 1)
* Chapter 2.1 (menu_order == 0)
* Chapter 3 (menu_order == 2)
* Chapter 4 (menu_order == 3)
* Chapter 4.1 (menu_order == 0)

In order for next_post_link_plus to work the way I want, the menu_order needs to ignore hierarchy. Everything would work fine if Simple Page Ordering set menu_order like so:

* Chapter 1 (menu_order == 0)
* Chapter 1.1 (menu_order == 1)
* Chapter 1.2 (menu_order == 2)
* Chapter 1.3 (menu_order == 3)
* Chapter 1.4 (menu_order == 4)
* Chapter 2 (menu_order == 5)
* Chapter 2.1 (menu_order == 6)
* Chapter 3 (menu_order == 7)
* Chapter 4 (menu_order == 8)
* Chapter 4.1 (menu_order == 9)

…But that’s not how it works, and as far as I can tell the other page ordering plugins set menu_order in the same way.

So, this is not a problem with your plugin at all and you may be unable to help, but I’m wondering if you might have any suggestions on how to solve the problem short of manually setting menu_order.

TY,
-Patrick