Smarter Navigation

When displaying a single post, you might want to show links to the previous and next posts in the same category.

That’s fine; WordPress let’s you do this with previous_post_link() and next_post_link().

But what if that post is in multiple categories?

What if the user came to that post from a tag page or from an author page? Wouldn’t it make more sense to display previous / next posts from that particular set?

Well, you can do this with a similar pair of functions, provided by this plugin: previous_post_smart() and next_post_smart().

Here’s how it works:

Whenever a visitor goes to an archive page (category, tag, date, author, search etc.), the plugin notes which archive it is in a browser cookie.

Then, if the visitor goes to a single post from that archive page, the…