List related posts based on title

How are you assigning the post to the same person in the podcast. Is this via a category or something like that?

If I understand your question, just through the title. Each episode comes into WP via rss which is generated by a php script. When the episode is imported into WP the name of the person is part of the title of the post. Categories are used only to designate that it is a podcast from radio program.

Wondering if you had any more thoughts on this? A bit more info… Using a plugin, WordPress imports podcast episodes as posts from the podcast rss feed. The posts consists entirely of content that is imported from that feed. The feed is populated with info from mysql db.

I hope we can get this working. I really like how your plugin displays related posts. Thanks for your help.

One thing that you could try is the keyword feature in the metabox at the bottom of editing the post. I’m not sure how it would work with “names” of people as opposed to a common word

Hey Ajay, FWI, entering the name into the metabox does work. Thanks for that suggestion. That will be my go-to option if necessary. I’m really hoping that I can get the plugin to do this automatically so that I don’t have to manually enter anything.

So, setting the manual metabox method aside for the moment, I’ve been working with different settings and gotten pretty close to getting my desired results automatically.

As it stands now I can get the correct related podcast posts to display (same person/different episode). However, when there is someone that shares a first or last name, etc… those posts display as well. That’s what I’m trying to eliminate right now.

I’m using only the post title to select related posts. Here is how the post titles come in from the rss feed:
Chug Garreau (Lakota) Part 1
Chug Garreau (Lakota) Part 2
Chug Garreau (Lakota) Part 3

I’m trying to figure out how the plugin chooses what is related from the title. I’ve got “1” selected for number of common terms. The results displayed are using “Garreau”. Not sure why it wouldn’t use “Chug” since it is the first common word. Whatever the reason, this setting of “1” gets me closest to what I’m looking for.

I was thinking that using “2” for the common terms setting would narrow it down but the results were further off. It seems when “2” is used it picks up on “Part 1” and then I get more random results, all containing “Part 1”. Not sure why it wouldn’t use “Chug” and “Garreau” since they are the first common words in the title.

Is there a way to globally select only the first two or three words in the post title in order for the plugin to determine related posts?

Also, is there a way to globally exclude words when the plugin is looking at the title to find related posts? If so, I would use it to exclude “Part 1”, etc.

I can email a pdf of the settings I’m using if that would be helpful.

Thanks so much much for your help.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by tosok.

I’ve been giving this a proper think, and I think the issue comes where you have terms vs names etc. Are you in a position to implement either categories or tags for the authors?

That would be the cleanest way to limit the related posts to only these authors. Additionally, if you’re displaying the tags on your theme, users can just click through to get the list of all the posts under the same tag.