New Plugin AZIndex Available : Create alphabetical indexes for your blog posts.

Announcing the AZIndex Plugin, a flexible WordPress plugin for generating alphabetical indexes of your weblog’s posts.

Enhance your WordPress blog by creating multiple, three-level alphabetical indexes of your posts based on any combination of post title, author, extract, or custom fields of your choice. Select which posts are included in your indexes using a combination of categories and tags, display them in up to four columns on a single page or over multiple pages.

For example, the AZIndex plugin can be used to:

* create an alphabetical index of all your blog posts, based on their titles, using extracts as short descriptions.
* create a review index, sorted by the name of the artist/author and the name of their albums/books.
* on blogs with multiple authors, create an index of posts by each author’s name.

Full list of features:

* Index posts by title, extract, author, or any custom field.
* Select index contents using a combination of categories and tags.
* One, two or three-level entries – heading, subheading, and description, all customizable.
* Up to four columns on a page.
* Multiple indexes can be created, each customized with its own settings.
* Fully customizable from the WordPress admin console. No need to know HTML or CSS.
* Single or multi-page indexes.
* Optionally generated links to each letter and page in the index.
* Group entries with the same heading under one entry (e.g. all the novels of the same author).
* Add your own text to the index pages.
* Control the number of items per page.
* Customize the stylesheets for the index page directly from the index administration page.

Minimum versions tested:

* WordPress v2.5 (not tested on prior versions of WordPress, but may work on recent versions like 2.3)
* PHP 5 (should work with PHP 4.3 onwards but it is, as yet, untested. Note: If any PHP 5-only APIs are found in the plugin code, I will remove them, if possible).
* MYSQL 5.0.

BETA Code:

Please note that this is the first public release of this plugin. I have been testing the plugin for a couple of weeks, but I have included a good number of features and it’s hard to test every combination of all the available options. So feel free to play, it’s very easy to use. Just be warned that it might not be entirely bug free on all combinations of browser and software releases.

Please make sure to read the release notes so you fully understand the limitations of this beta release.

If you’re interested, AZIndex Plugin is available at the following web address:

AZIndex Plugin version 0.1 (BETA)

Please leave comments, bug reports and feedback on that page.

I will add the plugin to the WordPress Plugin Repository within the next few days.