Implementing Pillar Posts; Long Posts yet with Some Page-Like Handling?

Question

One of the best blogging practices is that of writing "pillar posts" - featured content that's longer than a typical post and will likely generate a high volume of traffic to your site. Extensive tutorials, comprehensive user guides, and in-depth product reviews mostly fall into this category. They're the 1500-word behemoths that sit alongside your daily 300-word "update" articles.

Most of the times, pillar posts can be thrown to the top of your site with stickies. This makes them visible, directs the user's attention, and keeps timeless content relevant. After a while, though, you might want to promote these posts to static pages - still searchable and useful, but with their own special spot on the blog.

I have a series of articles I plan to write over the next month or so regarding the XML-RPC API built in to WordPress. It's a great system, but scantily documented ... so I'm going to put together some comprehensive method documentation.

The thing is, my docs will cover roughly 5-6 different pillar posts. I want this content to be featured on my blog when it's published (once per week), but I'd also like the entire series to be repeated as a static page on the site. The static page would be broken up into individual pages (using <!--nextpage--> to divide sections) so that each post is contained in a different section.

How can I have my featured content be both individual posts on the blog and a separate static page? I'm looking at both usability and SEO here ... having the content duplicated is a huge negative, so a simple copy-paste job with both versions on the site isn't my goal.

My first inkling would be to develop a custom post type for features like this with its own custom taxonomy. Each "post" would be an individual feature (custom post type) and would be owned by a series (custom taxonomy). Then each post could be included in the loop when published but also on the archive page for the series.

So my question (and the reason I'm marking this as a wiki), is how would you approach this situation?

Answer 1

As I was reading your post I was envisioning almost exactly what you prescribed at the end:

My first inkling would be to develop a custom post type for features like this with its own custom taxonomy. Each "post" would be an individual feature (custom post type) and would be owned by a series (custom taxonomy). Then each post could be included in the loop when published but also on the archive page for the series.

The only difference was I was thinking "Pages" instead of "Features" mostly because you referred to Pages in your question but Features is probably even better.

So your instincts are already spot-on, IMO anyway.

Answer 2

You could create a static page with its own loop calling only the posts which belong to your series. Or – much easier – create a custom taxonomie “series” and use the_content() on (/series/xml-rpc/) for the loop instead of the_excerpt().