Creating an archives page like mine

A plugin user recently wrote in asking me how to create an archives page like mine. So I thought I'd give everyone the lowdown on how to do this in this post.

First of all, there is no search box on my site just now because 1) I didn't think I had enough content to warrant this, and 2) I tag all the content I create quite extensively. So my archives view doesn't handle search results. Nor does it handle querying for specific dates, categories or authors. But I do handle querying for tags. Secondly, all the relevant template files from my theme for making this work can be found at the bottom.

Initial archives view

From the Wordpress theme developer documentation we know that we should provide an archive.php template file in our theme folder to handle the viewing of blog archives. I've implemented this for my theme. It gets shown when you click the Archives navigational button at the top of the page. In order for Wordpress to know that it needs to show this page when you visit /archives I have the following placed in my template's page.php:

if ('archives' == SITE_SECTION)
{
  require_once('archive.php');
  exit;
}

(The SITE_SECTION constant tells me which top-level site-section the user is currently in. This is linked to how I generate the navigational links at the top - the code for this is in my theme's functions.php).

I then create a publicly-viewable static page called 'Archives' and leave it empty, ensuring that its URL path is set to /archives. Now whenever someone visits this URL they get shown the contents of the archive.php template.

Inside archive.php I use the wp_tag_cloud() method to display a cloud of the most popular tags. I then have the following section of code to display all the posts, grouped by month:

// get all posts in descending date order
query_posts('posts_per_page=10000&orderby=date&order=DESC&post_type=post');

$list_of_posts = array();

// split entries into blog posts and static pages
while (have_posts())
{
  the_post();
  global $post;
  $list_of_posts[] = $post;
}

// show them
require_once('archive_show_posts_by_month.inc.php');

The archive_show_posts_by_month.inc.php script does exactly what it says on the tin. It takes the $list_of_posts array and outputs the posts, grouped by month. Now you might wonder why I'm calling query_posts and performing a database fetch. It's because by default Wordpress has only fetched the contents of the static page located at /archives since that's what it thinks is being displayed to the user. So in this code I fetch all the blog posts from the database (if you have more than 10,000 blog posts then by all means use a larger number in the query).

So that's the display of the initial archives page done. Now for the tag-specific archives (example)...

Archives for a given tag

At the top of archive.php I have the following code:

global $wp_query;
$qry_tag_name = $wp_query->query_vars['tag'];
if ('' != $qry_tag_name)
{
  require_once('archive_results.php');
  exit;
}

When you try to view the archives for a specific tag Wordpress will automatically invoke the archive.php template. This code then checks to see if you're viewing a specific tag rather than viewing the initial archives page. If so, it invokes the archive_results.php template. Inside this template we have the following code:

// get proper tag name
$tag_name = single_tag_title("", false);

$list_of_posts = array();
$list_of_pages = array();

// split entries into blog posts and static pages
while (have_posts()) :

  the_post();
  global $post;
  if ('post' === $post->post_type)
  {
    $list_of_posts[] = $post;
  }
  else if ('page' === $post->post_type)
  {
   $list_of_pages[] = $post;
  }

endwhile;

?>

<?php if have_posts(): ?>

  <div class="results_pages">
    All pages tagged **'<?php echo $tag_name ?>'**:

    <div class="indented">
      <?php require_once('archive_show_pages.inc.php'); ?>
    </div>

  </div>

  <div class="results_posts">

    All blog posts tagged **''**, from newest to oldest:

    <div class="indented">
      <?php require_once('archive_show_posts_by_month.inc.php'); ?>
    </div>

  </div>

<?php else: ?>

  No posts tagged **'<?php echo $tag_name ?>'** were found.

<?php endif; ?>

This code splits the list of entries (already loaded by Wordpress since you're viewing tag-specific archives) into static pages and blog posts. It then calls archive_show_pages.inc.php and archive_show_posts_by_month.inc.php to display each set of entries one after another.

Files

Template files from my theme: ZIP file.