WordPress provides the handy wp_get_archives() function for displaying post archives in your site, however depending on your site or blog, you may want to have some more advanced functionality. Let’s take a look at the options out there.
Smart Archives Reloaded
Smart Archives Reloaded allows you to display a list of posts grouped by year and month. It also provides several interesting navigation elements. It is probably the archive plugin which has the most configuration options, and is thus quite flexible.
Format list:
- list = a list of posts grouped by month
- block = a compact block of links to year and date archive pages
- menu = a two-level menu with links to year and date archive pages
- both = block + list (example)
- fancy = menu + list + JavaScript (example)
Clean Archives Reloaded
Clean Archives Reloaded generates a list of all of your posts, sorted by month. It’s enhanced with Javascript to allow collapsing and expanding of months.
It’s highly efficient and won’t kill your server with tons of MySQL queries.
Simple Nav Archives
This plugin makes the posts in your nav easily-groupable by month and year. It gives you quite a few easy-to-implement options that allow you to customize both which date groups are listed as well as how the markup is structured.
It’s typical output is as follows:
2011 (3)
– February (1)
– January (2)
2010 (6)
2009 (4)
Perhaps the primary benefit of this particular plugin over other plugins that do similar things is its ability to enclose the post count within the anchor tag. This solves countless problems for anyone using the CSS style display: block on anchor tags, which produces the undesirable result of forcing the post count down to the next line.
Archives for Custom Post Types
The following plugins will allow you to implement archives also on WordPress 3 custom post types.
Simple Custom Post Type Archives
Further Reading
http://www.noupe.com/WordPress/WordPress-archive-that-works-stepxstep-guide-and-plugins.html
