Archive page

Okay…I’m exhausted and I don’t know where else to turn.

I’m in the process of creating my first wordpress theme. I began with a blank theme downloaded from Chris Coyier’s “Creating and Editing Custom Themes”, at Lynda.com. Until now, everything has worked beautifully. However, I’ve run into an issue that I can’t seem to resolve – the Archive page zooms in whenever viewed. This happens no matter which browser I use.

Currently, I’m hosting this site on my computer using Bitnami. That shouldn’t make a difference, but I wanted to spell out every detail.

Thus far, I’ve tried several options to troubleshoot this issue: My first thought was that there was some anomaly in my CSS, so I removed it. However when I view the site with no CSS, I get the opposite effect…the text now appears to be zoomed out! ; I deactivated all of my plugins to no avail.; My last option was to remove any reference to “Archive” in my header.php file. None of these things made a difference.

Keep in mind, this page seems to function properly–listing an excerpt of my by the date, it just looks bad.

I decided to abandon the archive.php file, that came standard with this theme, and build a new file. I searched www.ads-software.com for an answer and stumbled on this article: Creating an Archive Index. This article suggest that I build a new page template called “archives.php” and then create a new page in the Admin and reference the newly created “archives.php” as the template for that page. All well and good. This fixes the zoom in issue. When I access the newly created “archives” page, it looks fine, but no excerpts appear. How am I supposed to link to the new page from the Archives widget menu.

That’s right, I’m using a sidebar widget to link to my Archives by date. I tried another method, as spelled out in the aforementioned article, but that still links to the old archive.php.

I’m hoping that someone might have experienced this problem before and have a quick and easy solution. The problem is probably staring me right in the face. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a Newb when it comes to coding php. I’ve learned quite a bit, but I still have a ways to go.

I’m simply looking for a way for users to reference my posts by date (monthly, yearly, whatever). The archive page may not be the correct way to do this, but I can’t seem to find another way. Will someone please help?