Content Management

Archive Date Header Plugin

4 Aug 2002

In the Movable Type support forums I’ve seen requests for the ability to group archives by date. Most of the time, people want to have an archive index that looks something like:

2002 August July June May April March February January
2001
December November October September August July June May April March February January

There have been a few people that have posted solutions using PHP or JavaScript, but I thought it would be nice to do this straight out of Movable Type.

Thus the Archive Date Header plugin was born.

Tim Appnel has taken over the maintenance and support of this plugin as of Oct 2004.

Download

You can get this plugin by downloading ArchiveDateHeader.zip

Installation

Unzip ArchiveDateHeader.zip and connect to your FTP server and open the directory where you have Movable Type installed.

Create a directory there called plugins if there isn’t one already and copy ArchiveDateHeader.pl to the plugins directory.

Using the plugin

Once you’ve installed the plugin you will have a new container tag, MTArchiveDateHeader. The tag only works within an MTArchiveList container tag, and if you try and use it elsewhere, you’ll receive an error.

If you use monthly archives, the contents of this container will only be printed when a new year starts.

If you use weekly archives, the contents of this container will only be printed when a new month starts.

If you use another sort of archive, the contents of this tag won’t be printed at all.

Here’s an example:

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<MTArchiveDateHeader>
<p><b><MTArchiveDate format="%Y"></b></p>
</MTArchiveDateHeader>
<a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><MTArchiveDate format="%B"></a> 
</MTArchiveList>

License

Like our other freeware, this plugin is released under the open-source MIT License. In plain English, that means you can do whatever you want with the software, including modifying it, selling it, or eating it, but we’re not responsible for anything that goes wrong.

Revision History

1.0 - August 4, 2002 Initial release.

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