Are you sick of seeing WordPress archives that stretch the length of your arm? If you are, then you might have just found the next best thing to sliced bread! The Kottke Style Archives plugin is a WordPress archives plugin which will display your yearly archives in a similar format to Jason Kottke.
If you’re wondering why you might want your archive page looking like that, there are a couple of simple explanations:
- You don’t like having to scroll
- You need or value your screen real estate
- You want your site to be more accessible on mobile devices, see point #2
- You want a change, after all – everyone has the same ol same ol archives page
You can find out all about the Kottke Style Archives plugin at its permanent home. If you have any comments, problems or suggestions – feel free to drop them into this thread.
Hello,
wp_posts is hardcoded so if $table_prefix is set in wp-config.php the plugin doesn’t work anymore.
This looks really great. However, I’m a php illiterate (as yet…) and would be grateful if you could provide more exact instructions:
1. How exactly does a call to the plugin look like
2. Where exactly should I place it?
Thanks a lot!
Following on from the comment left by Luc and an email from Ben Chun, I have updated the plugin to use the $wpdb->posts table reference.
Also via Ben Chun, the idea of a second parameter which can be used to format the month name displayed. By default it will use the PHP date ‘M’ formatting but you could just as easily send in an ‘F’ for a full month name.
You can download the revised version via the plugin home page.
Al.
Month names do not seem to work in localized versions of WP. Ie. we get January, February, etc. and not the German, Dutch, Finnish, whatever versions. Any idea?
Foreigner,
I actually got a pingback from someone who released a revised version of the plugin in another language.
As a solution to the problem, what if I allowed a third parameter which is an array of month names. I’ll default it to english names but if you want to override it with german, indian or something else; that’ll work too?
Al.
That would be nice. I googled the other solution and it works but as a long term solution (if that is necessary in such a small script ;) something else could work better.
Thanks, Al!
Foreigner,
There is probably an even simpler solution, I could use the PHP locale information to make the date return in multiple languages. There is a small caveat to using this method though, I have no idea how many web servers have all the locales installed on them. So if you wanted to change it to german but your host didn’t have the german locale files installed, it still wouldn’t work.
Thoughts and/or suggestions?
Al.
Al, this plugin comes very close to implementing the archive list format I use on my blog (see link), which up to now I’ve been hard coding.
You know what I’m going to ask: is it possible to add format options to display the year as YY, and the month as a single letter?
Also – without actually installing and running your plugin, I cannot tell – how does your script handle months for which there are no posts? With the format I use, it’s better to include the month unlinked. Dropping the empty month could be confusing…
Pilgrim,
The plugin already has support for formatting the month name, which is done by supplying the second paramter to the plugin. I could easily add the ability for you to format the year as well.
At the moment, the plugin will not display months which don’t have posts in them; which is inline with Jason Kottke’s archive page. Once again, I don’t think it would be too much effort to add that functionality into the plugin as well.
I’ll let you know when I have it sorted out.
Regards,
Al.
Al, about locales in servers. I think it’s not really a problem as users tend to use webhosts in their own countries. Therefore locales are ‘correct’ for them and they really do not need all of them. Just guessing, though. How does WP do this?
For accessibility purposes, how would one add a title attribute to each month’s link that’s formatted with the full name of the month — instead of just “Dec” or “12”, the title of the link would be “December 2007”?
Otherwise, this is a beautiful plug-in. Well done.