The Smart Archives WordPress Plugin

There’s a great WordPress plugin to present your WordPress archives on a seperate WordPress Page.  It’s called Smart Archives.  If you look at the Archives page on my blog you’ll see what this plugin does for you.

With most WordPress themes you can present your archives in a widget in a sidebar on your blog.  However, usually a theme’s archive widget displays months in a decsending chronological order.  Once clicked on a specific month, the blog is refreshed with just those blog posts from that month.

WordPress Archives

Smart Archives presents your archives on a single WordPress Page where you can list the year, month and post titles in descending chronological order.  The image below is from my blog’s Archive page:

Smart Archives

This allows your blog reader to click once on the Archive page and immediately see your archives titles only with links to each blog post.  This makes it much easier to scan your archives.  In most, if not all browsers, your readers could then use Ctrl-F (or whatever browser key is the search page key) to search the archives page for a specific word or words.

One caveat with this plugin is that you can’t run php in a WordPress Page.  So you have to download a plugin that allows you to run php in a page.  I used this one with success - Exec-PHP.

Installation

Smart Archives is one file, smartarchives.php.  Place that file in the root of your wordpress plugins folder, activate it and away you go.  Make sure you install the Exec-PHP plugin as well.

Here are some other choices and explanations on what the function will display:

“Type” is one of three values: block, list, or both. “Block” produces the block of years and months,1 “list” generates a reverse chronological list of your posts, including links to monthly archives, and “both” gives you the block and the list.

“Category ID” is simply the number of the category you want to exclude. If you want to exclude more than one category, simply put a space between them. Keep in mind that the “block” doesn’t exclude categories. If you call the function with no arguments it will default to “both” and will exclude no categories. Some examples follow — each is a proper invocation of the plugin.

Smart Archives Function

Download: Smart Archives and Exec-PHP

That’s It!!


If you liked this article, consider one of the following actions as a sign of a appreciation. Thanks!!

AddThis Social Bookmark Button



Related Posts

Tags


Join In The Fun, Leave A Comment!