Communicating with Prisoners content and the Ortext theme have a specific conceptual design. The Ortext Formatting plugin helps to realize that design. That plugin also supports alternate themes and other ortext content. We encourage you to experiment with designing an ortext. The Ortext Formatting plugin:

1. Registers the custom post types for the Communicating with Prisoners ortext. This is necessary to see the content Notes, Statistics, Datasets, and News.
2. Makes categories exclusive of child categories. Posts appear only in one, specific category to which they are assigned.
3. Makes topic (tag) archives encompass post_types post, notes, statistics, and datasets.
4. Reverses the chronological order of posts (makes posts substantively ordered forward in time). The ortext is written and read forward in time, except for the news.
5. Sets 3 posts per page for post_type post category archive pages, unlimited posts per page for tag archive pages, and 10 posts per page for other archive pages.
6. Eliminates display of the uncategorized category.
7. Defines behavior of specific context-sensitive links (notes, data) that can be added to menus.
8. Includes before selected page’s content a category outline linked to the relevant post_type.  This action occurs only if the page’s otx-category meta-key is set to main-outline. The relevant post_type is the post_type (s) following the page slug in a page named outline-{post_type (s)}. Including this functionality in the Ortext Formatting plugin provides better support for context-sensitive links in alternate themes. The same is true for similar functionality described below.
9. Includes after a selected page’s content a full dataset listing.  This action occurs only if the page’s otx-category meta-key is set to dataset-list.
10. Includes before a selected page’s content a topic (tag) cloud.  This action occurs only if the page’s otx-category meta-key is set to topic-cloud.
11. Includes after a selected page’s content an outline of pages with otx-category meta-key set to make-outline. This action occurs only if the viewed page’s otx-category meta-key is set to make-outline.
12. Excludes the custom post_type refs (references) from the primary site search.
13. Enables citation-pointer text for internal links.
14. Sets up including before page content an image chosen at random from a folder within wp-content. For the Communicating with Prisoners ortext, the images are photographic portraits of prisoners chosen from the folder faces.

To fit well visually within a theme’s design, the citation-pointer text and random display of images may require minor additions to an alternate theme’s css style sheet. Such code is easy to write. To preserve those style-sheet additions across updates of a generally available theme, you should make them with a child theme.

Additional ortext plugin support for timelining aids setting and spacing posts forward in time. Such support isn’t necessary for presenting existing content.

Citation-pointer text in internal links is passed through URLs as a GET variable. Using ortext support for internal key linking simplifies correctly formatting the citation-pointer text when creating new links.