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Re: Archives
Alesh, if you want monthly archives then go ahead and do them. It’s a well-known fact that we TXP users are a bunch of old fuddy-duddies (apart from Mary of course) but I think the points made here are quite valid.
Textpattern users change the world of blogging would be a nice headline. :)
And I’m not going to mention all those mile-long menus either. Woops! :grin:
Stuart
In a Time of Universal Deceit
Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.
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Re: Archives
I think you guys are thinking of sites that provide information on a specifici subject (programing, CSS, or whatnot). In that sort of site you’re looking for a particular thing you want information on.
The date archives do make lots of sense for sites that are more casual and entertainment-related. I’ve used the date archives on BoingBoing, this is broken, and others where I think “this is interesting, let me see more.” The archives keeps the articles in their original context, which is important in some cases, too.
In addition, monthly archives (esp when they have the # of posts with each month, which rss_suparchive_menu does) give a good overview of the history of a site. If someone has been posting regularly since 2002, they have more credibility then someone who started two months ago, right?
Yes, I have tried turning it off and on.
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#15 2005-09-15 13:41:49
- Anark
- Member
- Registered: 2004-08-14
- Posts: 101
Re: Archives
Ladies, gentlemen, your reaction to Alesh’s request is surreal.
You all know that that for the, shall we say, past five years, monthly archives have been the norm rather than the exception in weblogs. Dean maintains a weblog himself, and the software he created is widely praised for its flexibilty. Yet when it comes to doing one of the most basic, most widely-used weblog features, a plain old monthly archive, Textpattern um, er, doesn’t do that because, you see, it’s bad information architecture, bad usability and anyway, we’re all rather refined people here and above that sort of thing because Textpattern is a real CSM rather than a mere blogging tool?
You’re joking, right?
I’m sure somebody has figured out a way to do it, so would that person please step forward and submit a write-up to the TextBook?
(To avoid any confusion: this is about archive pages that each hold a month’s worth of postings and a simple way to link to those pages, preferably from a sidebar on the main page. )
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Re: Archives
Well there is a plugin that generates date based archives, as has been mentioned above. This topic has come up a million times on the site. The response from the developers (originally Dean, and now Alex, Sencer, etc.) is usually the same.
I find that most people simply want date based archives because they see them everywhere, not because they have any inherrent utility. You can page back and forth through a site with textpattern, so it isn’t impossible to see posts within the context they were written.
When I have time, I may reproduce in Textpattern 4.0.1 what I had in my forked version of Textpattern 1.19, generating pages of articles that occur within a given time frame, which would let you have a ‘pages that each hold a month’s worth’.
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Re: Archives
I agree with Anark – the response is surreal, as is the feature’s continued absence from TXP despite repeated requests and its presence in every competitor.
As for the plugin – if you’re talking about suparchive, it’s an admirable plugin, but it won’t work in all contexts (it wouldn’t work on my site – something to do with sections). There used to be a great one – akw_date_aware I think, but it hasn’t been updated in eons.
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Re: Archives
The plugin you are talking about was pretty good, but a much bigger pain to set up that supararchive is. Both aren’t particularly good solutions to this problem.
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Re: Archives
Wow, in the comments there zem says he was working on a plugin for date-based archives. And you seem pretty close to doing just that, fellow Torontonian. Could it happen?
Basically all I need is a list of months that are clickable and go to monthly archives, not all the fancy Dunstan stuff. I’m sure most people are the same.
Incidentally, would Chris’ hack still work on 4.0? (actually I don’t think I want to risk it)
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Re: Archives
I don’t think Chris’ hack would not work anymore. A lot of the code for listing articles has been moved around or changed.
My old site had a table with all the months you have posted, and links to pages with all the posts for each month. If you visited my site last week you coud have seen it. It was one of the things I was willing to part with when I upgraded.
I guess I can work on this sort of stuff next. The problem is trying to figure out how to do this without editing the Textpattern source itself. I noticed that in another thread article custom is mentioned as being able to select out all the posts in a month. I’ll look in to this more.
Last edited by ramanan (2005-09-15 15:06:19)
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Re: Archives
I agree with Alesh and Anark too.
We have a lot of tag and plugins, why not one that allows for date based archiving? Also, I’d like to choose if I want a list of article for the year 2003 in one or more section I choose, and the possibility to list all articles from march 2002 to semptemper 2004. Why not? That could be used in advanced search, or even in listing articles. We have some plugin that go near in that direction, but not exactly…
In multifaceted architeture, it’s quite normal to have more than one way to navigate through the content, and the date is one of the ways. And it should be flexible.
So, if one would think about it, it would be great! :)
Z-
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Re: Archives
I finally looked at Stuart’s technique, with article_custom, which is exactly what I don’t need. His solution produes a list of article names, with permalinks to the individual article page. Makes sense for his site, but what I need is a list of months (no article titles) that link to pages with all the articles in that month (again, boingboing is a good example).
I understand that there is a way to do this with article_custom, but i reckon it requires a separate section and page for every month; that’s a really serious pain.
Incidentally, my articles by category work great this way, just not by date. When I experimented with rss_suparchive_menu i got the list to output (including number of posts in each month in parenthesees, which is great), but could never properly link to the page.
I suppose my solution is to go back and struggle with that until it works. I’m just here to say that it is a struggle.
Yes, I have tried turning it off and on.
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Re: Archives
Well Rob has recently commented in the plug-in thread that he is aware of the current date problem with his rss_suparchive which is down to recent code changes in TXP and he’ll get it updated as soon as he has the time. I think he’s a little snowed under at the moment. The plug-in is probably the best way to go with this if you can hang on for a bit alesh. And don’t take anything here personally, we just like to get these things out in the open now and again. :)
Stuart
In a Time of Universal Deceit
Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.
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#24 2005-09-16 00:30:47
- Anark
- Member
- Registered: 2004-08-14
- Posts: 101
Re: Archives
A point worth considering, perhaps: minor stuff like the absence of monthly archives can and does play hard against Textpattern. In some quarters people believe that Wordpress is a much maturer program — because, look at Textpattern: they haven’t figured out trackback yet and you can’t even do monthly archives. How retarded is that?
I’ve also seen a very tech-savvy guy regret his decision to go with Textpattern because, well, he wanted monthly archives for his blog like everyone else, and Textpattern is so damn screwy when you want to have those. He’s runnning Wordpress now.
So Textpattern is the CMS of poets, lovers and madmen. With a bit of effort, it could be the blogging tool of mere bloggers, too.
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