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.

*** snazzy-archives-original/snazzy-archives.php	2009-08-28 04:37:48.000000000 -0700
--- snazzy-archives/snazzy-archives.php	2009-11-28 19:03:38.000000000 -0800
***************           function ScriptsAction()
*** 117,123 ****
            }
            function delete_cache()
            {
!               @unlink($this->cache_path . "snazzy_cache.htm");
            }

            // Handle our options
--- 117,129 ----
            }
            function delete_cache()
            {
!               if(!$dh = @opendir($this->cache_path))
!                   return;
!               while (false !== ($obj = readdir($dh)))
!               {
!                   if ((strstr($obj, "snazzy_cache.htm") !== false) || (strstr($obj, "snazzy_cache-") !== false))
!                       @unlink($obj);
!               }
            }

            // Handle our options
***************           function createflashcode($tagc
*** 281,289 ****
                return $flashtag;
            }

!           function display()
            {
                global $wpdb;

                $options = $this->get_options();

--- 287,299 ----
                return $flashtag;
            }

!           function display($atts)
            {
                global $wpdb;
+               extract( shortcode_atts( array(
+                   'filteryear' => '0',
+               ), $atts ) );
+               $filteryear = floor($filteryear);

                $options = $this->get_options();

***************           function display()
*** 299,305 ****

                if ($cache) {
                    // cache part
!                   $data = @file_get_contents($this->cache_path . "snazzy_cache.htm");

                    // return the cache data if it exists
                    if ($data)
--- 309,315 ----

                if ($cache) {
                    // cache part
!                   $data = @file_get_contents($this->cache_path . "snazzy_cache-" . $filteryear . ".htm");

                    // return the cache data if it exists
                    if ($data)
***************           function display()
*** 316,322 ****
                        $oby = 'YEAR(post_date) DESC, post_date ';
                    else
                        $oby = 'post_date DESC ';
!                   $query = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_password = '' AND post_type IN ($types) ORDER BY " . $oby;

--- 326,335 ----
                        $oby = 'YEAR(post_date) DESC, post_date ';
                    else
                        $oby = 'post_date DESC ';
!                   $query = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_password = '' AND post_type IN ($types) ";
!                   if ($filteryear != 0)
!                       $query .= " AND post_date >= '" . $filteryear . "-01-01 00:00:00' AND post_date <= '" . $filteryear . "-12-31 23:59:59' ";
!                   $query .= "ORDER BY " . $oby;

***************           function display()
*** 428,433 ****
--- 441,448 ----
                    $day = date('d', $date);
                    $month = date('M', $date);
                    $year = date('Y', $date);
+                   if (($filteryear != 0) && ($year != $filteryear))
+                       continue;

                    $imageurl = "";
***************           function display()
*** 448,453 ****
--- 463,469 ----
                            $backgroundImagename = $post->ID . '-' . md5($imageurl);

                            // If image already downloaded then use it otherwise download it
+                           $oldError = error_reporting(0); //suppress errors for 404s in offsite images (users shouldn't be hotlinking images, but still....)
                            if (is_file($this->images_path . $backgroundImagename)) {
                                $imageurl = $backgroundImagename;
                            } else if (false !== file_put_contents($this->images_path . $backgroundImagename, file_get_contents($imageurl))) {
***************           function display()
*** 456,461 ****
--- 472,478 ----
                            } else {
                                $imageurl = "";
                            }
+                           error_reporting($oldError);
                        }
                    }
                    // get comments from WordPress database
***************           function display()
*** 586,592 ****

                if ($cache)
                    // write cache
!                   @file_put_contents($this->cache_path . "snazzy_cache.htm", $result);

                return $result;
            }
--- 603,609 ----

                if ($cache)
                    // write cache
!                   @file_put_contents($this->cache_path . "snazzy_cache-" . $filteryear . ".htm", $result);

                return $result;
            }