Series got a lot simpler with the backported view hook, which is called after the filtering process, but 4.4 users need to apply a patch to have this hook

New module providing the ability to organize nodes into series (via taxonomy). Nodes in the same series can be listed in the node body (which also requires that this module interacts with filtercache properly).

Some people think that this module (or the role this module enforces on the filter system) is a bit overstretching of what the filter system is supposed to do. I don't think so.