Archives

ramanan · 2005-09-15 13:50:30

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’.

Daragh · 2005-09-15 13:56:48

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.

ramanan · 2005-09-15 14:18:41

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.

Chris from Pixel Meadow wrote in some detail how to set things up for 1.19 if you want to hack your install.

Daragh · 2005-09-15 14:36:39

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)

ramanan · 2005-09-15 15:04:15

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)

Zanza · 2005-09-15 15:07:55

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-

alesh · 2005-09-15 16:43:37

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.

thebombsite · 2005-09-15 21:03:55

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. :)

Anark · 2005-09-16 00:30:47

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.

ubernostrum · 2005-09-16 02:40:48

I think the problem with built-in monthly archives at the moment would be that they pretty much shackle you to the /year/month/day/title URL scheme, which is fine for blogging but abominable for most other purposes. Of course, per-section URL schemes (where selecting /year/month/day/title scheme for a section would automagically enable the date-based archives people are apparently clamoring for) would certainly go a long way toward resolving this… where’s my poking stick?

Last edited by ubernostrum (2005-09-16 02:41:52)

thebombsite · 2005-09-16 02:53:24

Oh no! Not the dreaded poking stick. :)

alesh · 2005-09-16 03:22:18

I guess I just don’t understand, but “txp:category_list” does with categories exactly what I need to have done with months. So how does one require a certain URL scheme and not the other?

I know rss_suparchive_menu requires a URL scheme, but if the feature were built-in surely it would require no such thing?

ubernostrum · 2005-09-16 04:22:31

alesh: it’s kind of hard to do date-based archives if you’re not using date-based URLs in them. And since TXP currently limits you to only one URL scheme site-wide, well, you’re kind of stuck.

KurtRaschke · 2005-09-16 11:07:16

> ubernostrum wrote:

> And since TXP currently limits you to only one URL scheme site-wide, well, you’re kind of stuck.

Yes, but isn’t there a plugin to support all of the URL schemes at once, or something like that? It seems to me that putting the two together would give the desired effect—then the only thing left to do would be to roll it into Textpattern itself, so that new users don’t have to go through this all over again when they decide they want archives by month.

-Kurt

alesh · 2005-09-16 12:16:22

> ubernostrum wrote:

> it’s kind of hard to do date-based archives if you’re not using date-based URLs in them

Why? If I can have a function called category_list that creates a list of items that each link to a “/index.php?c=category” then how hard would it be to make a function called month_list that links to a “/index.php?c=monthyear” and setup txp to interpert the latter pretty much the same as the former? It’s beyond my programing capacity, but it sure doesn’t sound like a particularly complicated database call.

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#16 2005-09-15 13:50:30

Re: Archives

#17 2005-09-15 13:56:48

Re: Archives

#18 2005-09-15 14:18:41

Re: Archives

#19 2005-09-15 14:36:39

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#20 2005-09-15 15:04:15

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#21 2005-09-15 15:07:55

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#22 2005-09-15 16:43:37

Re: Archives

#23 2005-09-15 21:03:55

Re: Archives

#24 2005-09-16 00:30:47

Re: Archives

#25 2005-09-16 02:40:48

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#26 2005-09-16 02:53:24

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#27 2005-09-16 03:22:18

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#28 2005-09-16 04:22:31

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#29 2005-09-16 11:07:16

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#30 2005-09-16 12:16:22

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