Smarter Archives

When you use the [smarter-archives] shortcode anywhere in a post or a page, it gets replaced by a listing of every year since you started posting, with a list of links to each month for that year. However, the plugin is smart enough to know if you didn’t create any content in any given month, and doesn’t make a link for that month. See the Screenshots section for an example of it in action.

See the Usage section for a complete list of the arguments the shortcode takes, and how you can use them to customize your archives listing.

The month names are internationalized with the WordPress translation API. A POT file is included, and if you want to translate please feel free to do so and submit a new pull request on GitHub. If you do not know how to use GitHub, you can also contact me directly. Here are the translations that have been done so far:

• Dutch (nl_NL)
• French (fr_FR)
• German (de_DE)
• Italian (it_IT)
• Spanish (es_ES)
• Russian (ru_RU)

The original concept for this plugin comes from a plugin by Justin Blanton.

Usage

The [smarter-archives] shortcode takes these arguments (default values included):

• mode (default: output) — if it’s set to output, the plugin prints the listing. Set it to false to return the value
• wrapper_class (default: smart-archives) — class given to the tag wrapped around the listing (
  by default)
• wrapper_tag (default: div) — tag wrapped around the listing
• year_link_class (default: year-link) — class given to each year links
• year_tag (default: p) — tag around each year group
• year_class (default: none) — class for the tag around each year group
• after_year (default: :) — value after the year and before the list of months
• month_link_class (default: month-link) — class given to each month link
• month_tag (default: span) — tag around each month
• after_month (default:  ) — spacer between months
• empty_month_class (default: empty-month) — class applied to empty months (can use this to gray them out)
• order (default: DESC) — order the years are shown in (ASC for ascending, DESC for descending)

Advanced Usage

There is a function, get_smarter_archives(), that returns the raw array with the years, months, and post counts. You can use this for ultimate customization.

Example Usage

[smarter-archives order="DESC" after_month="•"]
License
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.

A full version of the license is included with the plugin in license.txt.