Earlier this year, I got seri­ous about the post archives here at Netninja.com.  I added meta­data for sev­eral years worth of posts.  Partly this was me being anal-retentive and partly this was to facil­i­tate bet­ter search­ing, brows­ing, and match­ing related posts.  This was a suc­cess­ful project, but exposed what I believe to be a defi­ciency in Word­Press: Although search­ing and serendip­i­tously falling into related posts is easy, there is no easy way to browse sev­eral years worth of posts.

I ini­tially used Clean Archives Reloaded for brows­ing old posts.  As I under­stand it, Clean Archives Reloaded was writ­ten by a Port­land local.  This worked fairly well, but didn’t play well with the wp-typography plu­gin I use.  Wp-typography takes text and replaces reg­u­lar quotes with smart quotes, pro­motes com­bi­na­tions of dashes to fancy em– and en-dashes and what­not.  With the size of my archives, the web server croaked due to mem­ory usage.  I patched wp-typography to ignore this page, but every time I upgraded the plu­gin, my changes would get over­writ­ten and I would inevitably for­got to re-edit the rel­e­vant files, leav­ing my archives broken.

I finally gave up and started explor­ing other options.  Snazzy Archives looked rather nifty.  I tried it out and it… mostly worked.  Due to the size of my archives, it took for­ever to gen­er­ate the page.  The browser chugged along try­ing to dis­play it.  I would often get Error 500 from my web host due to the server load of gen­er­at­ing the page.

This plu­gin uses a short­code to invoke: [ snazzy-archive ] (with­out the spaces — I did not want to invoke the archive here).  You sim­ply cre­ate a page, add that short­code to the page, and it gets replaced by the fancy archive.

What I ended up doing was hack­ing the plu­gin so that the short­code takes an optional “fil­teryear” argu­ment.  If miss­ing, all years are dis­played.  If present, the results are fil­tered to just that year.  In this way, I can cre­ate sep­a­rate pages for 2001, 2002, 2003, and so on.  This makes the ren­der­ing, dis­play, and pre­sen­ta­tion much more man­age­able.  It can then be invoked with: [ snazzy-archive filteryear="2008" ]

The patch is down below, for those that care.  I will be sub­mit­ting it to the author soon.  My next step is to fig­ure out the CSS enough so that the miss­ing right-hand mar­gin on the archive pages can return.

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Tagged as: archives, cleanarchivesreloaded, index, meta, snazzyarchives, wordpress