Feature Request: Bring back a real archives feature

  • One of my biggest complaints with ver. 1.5 is that WP now doesn’t seem to produce real archives that work the way everyone expects an archive to work.

    Unless you install a lot of hacks and plugins, your archive page is going to look exactly like the blog home page. It’s going to have exactly the same number of posts, even if it is supposed to be a monthly archive. You can set things up to show only a few posts on your home page, but then your archives only show a couple of posts with previous and next buttons.

    That’s not how archives work in any other blogging platform I’ve ever seen, and it definitely isn’t very intutive to blog readers. When you have a monthly archive, that’s exactly what it should be – a page of every single post made that month without previous and next buttons. Someone who is looking for a specific article might never find it in a busy blog the way it is now currently setup.

    I would love to convert my blogs back to 1.2, simply because I would have archives that work the way a normal blog archive is supposed to work without hacking it for days to fix it. ?? I hate to say it, but as feature-poor as blogger is, at least they know what an archive is.

    What would be wonderful is if someone could write a plugin that works with 1.5 that would make real archives. And that would give you the option of excerpts of articles on archive pages, just titles, or complete posts. And get rid of those previous – next buttons on all the pages!

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • The following plugin allows you to specifiy different post count for frontpage and archive view.
    https://mattread.com/archives/2005/03/custom-query-string-plugin/

    Previous-next button, full content vs excerpts, and what to be shown on archive view is controlled by the presence of correponding template tags. You could have a file named archive.php (a sample available in Default Theme) and specify how you want your archive view would be like.

    I was going to refer to the archive.php thing as well. You can at least have complete control over the look of things that way.

    The post count thing is a bit of an issue, but sounds like there’s a plugin to help with that. Unfortunately, you don’t just want ‘all posts under this archive section’, as it could be 100 or 1000 for certain archives (year, category, etc.). So set it to a higher number, but retain the next/prev buttons for really long lists… I myself would probably cap it at a few dozen at most.

    Thread Starter LindaB

    (@lindab)

    Thanks for pointing out the custom query string plugin. That’s exactly what I was looking for. I think it will do the job, and I’ll play with it a bit and think about the issue of really long archives. But at least now I have somewhere to start.

    That’s exactly what I was looking for too ?? I just upgraded to 1.5 today and was having the same concerns as LindaB.

    Thread Starter LindaB

    (@lindab)

    Yes, it’s nice that there are always people here on the forum who can point us toward a solution with any problem. ??

    However, I do hope the creators of WP will seriously consider bringing back a real archives feature in the next version of WP. We shouldn’t have to use a plugin to get a feature that every other blog platform already has. WP is just too good to miss something as basic as this.

    WordPress 1.2: “Why aren’t my archives paged?”
    WordPress 1.5: “Why are my archives paged?”

    To each their own. That’s why we have plugins.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    I’ll have to agree with Ryan here. During the v1.2 era, there was a massive amount of complaints begging for paginated archives. Now that v1.5 has been released, we get a massive amount of complaints begging for non-paginated archives. Go figure. This is precisely the reason why plugins were created in the first place. Plugins were created to take the burden of features which were not added to the WordPress release due to their controversial nature.

    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Template_Tags

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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