John&Jacq~s Garden

WordPress WP-Archives plugin is so awesome!

Yippee! I just had this cool WP-Archives plugin installed! Check our archives page here and you’ll understand why I’m bursting with joy. This is something I had yearned longingly for so long but clueless about how to get it done. Hehe…now I can give myself a pat on the back for installing one myself, after much researching and trotting boldly ahead.

Plugins? Never installed one before this! Just knew that they were necessary to achieve certain functionality in our site and whatever basic plugins needed were installed by our darling son, David when he initiated the site’s setup years ago.

I had wanted a single page that can automatically generate a display of the entire collection of all our posts. Opportunity came recently when I was researching to write my previous article on how to create a wordpress dropdown monthly archives for the sidebar. That led me to explore a few links that rendered new insights. One such site was Geek With Laptop on its plugin, SRG Clean Archives, but instructions on how to go about installing and activating it just got me more perplexed than ever…my dummy head simply couldn’t comprehend all the tech lingo! Just too bad for me as I like its plugin which gives the option to toggle on/off to collapse and expand the monthly archives.

Well, the next best way, I thought was to return to our site’s dashboard admin page to explore further. Did a plugins search for SRG clean archives and viola!…WP-archives popped up as the only result!. Whoa! I was more than pleased! Its description really got me excited as keywords like “based on SRG..faster..easy install..no additional configuration..” held me spellbound and I knew instantly I wanted to install this plugin for our website!

A big thank you to Jim Pinaloza Calixto who authored this awesome WP-Archives plugin (version 0.8), we’re most grateful!

WP-Archives as described in WordPress Plugin Directory, is a plugin based on SRG Clean Archives but modified to be faster and not using additional libraries. It will create a list with all the posts, grouped by months and years like a tree of contents.

Features:

• Easy install
• Clean list of your posts
• No additional configuration is required

How to use:

• Create a page called ‘Archives’
• On page created to insert the text:
  <!--wp_archives-->

As described, it’s easy to install!
It definitely was…I never knew earlier that it was so very easy and simple, and quick as well! Just one line of code to generate the cool display on our archives page! Humph…it took me years to ‘search’, yet took less than 10 minutes to execute one in our site! Hehe…better late than never, huh!

Learn to create an Archives Page, using the WP-Archives plugin
to automatically generate links to all your WordPress archived posts, well-displayed and sorted by post date (newest first) :

1. Log in to your WordPress site. At the site admin panel, scroll down to locate Plugins on the left column. Click on its dropdown arrow and then select Add New.
   
2. The Install Plugin window opens. Type in the text: wp-archives in the search box and click Search Plugins.
   The search result will then show the plugin, WP-Archives with relevant details. If you wish to get one, click the Install link located to the right to proceed.
3. A window pops up – click the Install Now button.
   (Note: as seen in the image below, the plugin’s version 0.8 is compatible up to WordPress ver. 2.7.1, so if you’re using a version of WordPress that is higher (ours is ver. 2.8.5), then a warning note would appear. I just ignored that and went ahead to install anyway and it turned out fine.)
   
   Another window pops up – click the Activate Plugin link.
4. Now, you need to create a page like you normally would from your Dashboard. Title your page, probably as Archives, and in the page content section, just add the following code :
   <!--wp_archives-->
5. Finally, click Publish and you’re done!

Isn’t your newly created Archives page beautiful? A cool archived display with a proper gateway into your blog’s history, and so easily achievable, right?

Happy blogging and happy learning!

Keep smiling and enjoy your blog’s new look! :)

Tags: archives, blogging tips, plugins, wordpress