Changing the Organize Series Listing Pages

Question

I'm using the Organize Series plugin on my WordPress site. This plugin adds a custom taxonomy type named "series" that allows you to group posts together. This plugin includes a custom listing page at URLs that look like the following

http://alanstorm.com/series/[series-name-here]/

I'd like to customize the HTML produced by these pages -- but I'm a little unsure how to do that. If this were the category listing page, I know I'd be able to create a category.php file in my child theme and start customizing the HTML. However, while these series pages do reuse the postlist.php template, they do not seem to reuse the category.php template.

While the above is the specific problem I'm trying to solve, I'd also be interested in learning how to debug this myself. i.e. is there a standard way plugins (should?) add new pages to the front-end? Or are most plugins coming up with their own to way to do this and I'll generally need to start by examining the actions the plugin author takes during plugin initilzation.

Answer 1

The template for the Series taxonomy is your-theme/taxonomy-series.php. Generally speaking, taxonomies use the taxonomy-{taxonomy-name}.php template which is outlined in the Template Hierarchy article in the Theme Development handbook. The diagram in that article is particularly helpful with determining what template WordPress is loading.

I double checked how the plugin registered the taxonomy by searching the plugin's code for register_taxonomy. The plugin used the name series for the Series taxonomy, which is pretty straight forward. Sometimes the taxonomy name will not match the human readable name or a prefix may be added to the name, so it's a good idea to double check this to make sure that the custom template is named properly.