Calendar Manipulation – How to?

the calendar is intended to display the dates on which you’ve made posts.

If you want to use it for another purpose – lets say… to display events… you’re better off looking for event calendar plugins.

Anything which isn’t related to its intended purpose is going to be a very major hack of the calendar system, so look for a plugin first.

@ Ivovic: Thank you for your reply.

I am trying to create an educational blog/website. I am actually back-dating posts on the days that it happened (in the 60s). So I would like my calendar to NOT get the current date.

what date would you have shown instead, say for instance on today?

the calendar displays all days, or it wouldnt be a calendar – it is intended to highlight days that contain posts.

he’s saying he wants it not to show the current month – or indeed year.
instead, it should show sometime in the 60s…

unfortunately, that’s just not a practical use of the calendar system as it stands now…

Instead of it displaying the current day in month. I would like it to be set to the month of July 1967.

aahhh, well if you are willing to hack the core, I can probably explain how to do that.

let me know what version of WP you are using too, just in case there are changes. I doubt that’s the case, but you never know.

And to be sure, is this something you want all of the time, or just today? do you want that month repeated over and over, ie, today is July 13, 1967, tomorrow is July 14, 1967.. and is next month going to be July over again, or is it going to be August?

Follow where I am going with these questions?

Do you want your post dates highlighted?

I am using the very latest version of wordpress (2.5).
I want it to always be the same month of the same year, forever and ever.
Yes, I would like my posts highlighted. It already does that I think.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.

it doesn’t really make much sense to me… and I’ll tell you why.

The more you post on your blog, the more days of that month will be highlighted, until they’re all highlighted which is about as useful as none of them being highlighted.

Seems to me, if you want a static calendar you can just copy/paste the HTML into your sidebar, and change the numbers.

there will only be 5 days highlighted.

ok, again… if the calendar will be static, why not just paste in the HTML in lieu of the actual calendar – with dates changed

yeah, I was going to reply last night after your last reply, and say pretty much the same thing — whatever youre attempting to accomplish doesnt make a whole lot of sense.

why do you even need a calendar, if its going to say the same day all of the time, and only highlight 5 days? (thats a rhetorical question)

thats not really something I think I need to go dig thru code for, sorry.

I agree that in this particular instance, the original poster is probably best off just copying, pasting and modifying the calendar html. It’s only one month, with a few days worth of posts. But that said, what he’s asking for isn’t nonsensical.

I’ve got a historical “blog” for which I’d like pretty much the same thing. The site is a series of letters written on particular days. WordPress works well for managing and displaying this kind of information. The entire collection of letters only spans a few months. I’d like to be able to have just the relevant months displayed in the sidebar, with the current letter (or letters, in the case of search results) highlighted on the calendar. Such a UI would allow users to easily navigate the entire collection, and the same time underscore where the current document falls in a series of historical events. For this project, the current date doesn’t matter. Nor do future posts… there won’t be any. Something like get_calendar(1965, 7) would be a very handy function for me.

Perhaps the term nonsensical is a little too verbatim for what I said, especially if you’re going to use the standard definition of the word.

I really, really meant, like “it doesnt make sense to handle that that way”, the kind of head scratching “that doesnt make sense..” sort-of thing. Ya know?

As for a historical blog, and only wanting to display months with posts that is probably doable. Before attempting that though, I am assuming that if you navigate via the calendar to a “historic” month that contains posts, that it displays properly???

I’m left asking the same question again…. assuming the same problem that the date simply cannot be manually set back far enough…

if you have a finite number of posts for historical record, then your calendar is STATIC – there’s no need for it to be dynamic, and hence no need to butcher wordpress, or dive into code you can’t understand.

The request not only doesn’t make sense – but it’s entirely nonsensical.

Just view the source for a page with the calendar in it… copy the HTML… change the dates and the links, then paste it into your sidebar.

Job done.

If you want to be super-creative about it, you can put some conditionals around it all to display a different calendar depending on the archived month you’re viewing.

If this seems like an inelegant solution, let me point out, it will seem much more elegant at your next upgrade, when you’re thanking God (rather than me) that you didn’t massacre wordpress core code.

why don’t you just edit the posts publish date?