Description
PenBinder turns any WordPress site into a home for serialized fiction and web novels, without renting your audience from a third-party platform.
Core features:
- Stories and Chapters as their own content types, with nested, readable URLs (
/story/your-story/chapter-one/) - Distraction-free reading mode that bypasses your theme’s header, sidebar, and footer for a clean, focused reading page
- An automatic reading progress bar, word count, and estimated read time on every chapter
- Chapter-level bookmarking for logged-in readers, so a “Continue Reading” button always picks up where they left off
- Genres and Status taxonomies (Ongoing / Completed / On Hiatus) with a filterable Stories archive
- Characters and Locations as linkable profile pages — wrap a name in a chapter with a shortcode and it becomes a clickable link to their profile. A character or location can appear in more than one story, useful for a shared cast or setting across a series
- Series, grouping multiple stories together and letting readers browse by canonical (in-universe) order or real-world release date — handy for prequels, spin-offs, and books published out of order
- A unified Story Dashboard for managing a story’s chapters (with drag-and-drop reordering), characters, and locations from a single screen
- Native WordPress comments on chapters
- A Settings page for reading column width, font size, theme, and toggling distraction-free mode on or off
PenBinder is free and fully functional on its own. A separately-sold PenBinder Pro add-on exists for drip/scheduled chapter releases, subscriber email notifications, and EPUB export, but PenBinder does not require it and every feature listed above works without it.
Privacy
PenBinder does not send any data to external servers, does not set its own cookies, and does not track visitors. Chapter bookmarks are stored as standard WordPress user meta for logged-in readers only, and never leave your site’s database.
Installation
- Upload the plugin files to
/wp-content/plugins/penbinder, or install the plugin directly through the Plugins screen in wp-admin. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen.
- Permalinks are flushed automatically on activation. If a story or chapter page ever returns a 404, visit Settings > Permalinks and click Save once.
- Go to PenBinder > Add New Story to create your first story, then PenBinder > Chapters > Add New to add its chapters.
FAQ
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Do I need PenBinder Pro to use this plugin?
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No. PenBinder is complete on its own — Story/Chapter management, Series, Characters, Locations, the distraction-free reader, and the Story Dashboard are all free. PenBinder Pro is a separate, optional add-on for drip-scheduled releases, subscriber email notifications, and EPUB export.
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Can a character or location belong to more than one story?
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Yes. Characters and Locations can be linked to any number of Stories, which is useful for a shared cast or setting across a series or spinoff.
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Can I turn off the distraction-free reading mode?
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Yes, under PenBinder > Settings — chapters will then render inside your theme’s normal layout instead.
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Does this work with any theme?
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The reading page, story page, and archive intentionally bypass the active theme for a clean, consistent layout, so yes — it looks the same regardless of the theme you’re running.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“PenBinder” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “PenBinder” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.1
- Added a small, dismissible note on the Settings page pointing to PenBinder Pro (drip releases, reader email notifications, EPUB export). No other changes.
1.0.0
- Initial release: Stories, Chapters, distraction-free reading, bookmarking, Genres/Status, Characters, Locations, Series, the Story Dashboard, and chapter comments.