Archives for each category on WP Multisite

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1. I thought I’d let you know how I resolved this.

   After some discussion with a colleague, he made the point that adding a trailing year to the url, doesn’t affect the page displayed (I haven’t had time to find out the rationale for this yet) so:

   /category/subcat/2011/

   displays the same page as

   /category/subcat/

   This meant that I could parse the url and take the year from it and add it to the query.

   I added this to the header to parse the url (I’m sure there are more efficient ways, but this worked well for me):

   $current = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; // get the url
   
   $parts = explode('/',$current); // break the url down into parts
   $parts = array_slice($parts, 1, -1); // for some reason, first and last array items were blank, so trim them
   
   $pattern = "/d{4}/"; // set the pattern to match a 4 digit number
   $last = end($parts); // get the last item in the array
   $year = ''; // set the year variable to be empty
   
   if(preg_match($pattern, $last)) {  // test the last array item against the 4 digit pattern
       $year = $last; // if it is a number, then set the year variable to that value
       $parent_parts = array_slice($parts, 0, -1); // as I need this to work with both the url having a number at the end and on the parent page too (without a year in the URL), make the parent part path by trimming out the year component
   
       $parent = implode('/',$parent_parts); // remake the url parts
       $parent = '/'.$parent.'/';  // add leading and trailing slashes
   } else {
       $parent = $current;  // if the test doesn't find a year, just set the parent to the REQUEST_URI
   }
   

   This might seem overly complex for what it does, but the logic works. If I do a test for a year on:

   /category/subcat/

   I need the code to know what to do with this bit. As I’m always going to need this part of the url, if the url is:

   /category/subcat/2011/

   I’ll need to trim 2011 off of it. This becomes more apparent further down.

   I changed the title display from:

   <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
   

   to:

   <h2><?php echo get_the_title();
   if($year !== ''){
       echo ': Archives '.$year;
   }
   ?></h2>
   

   This just means that on the parent page, I output the title and on a year sub-page, I can add in an “: Archives 2011” to the end of it to make it look like a proper archive.

   I have a dropdown for the year at the top of the page. Previously this was populated with wp_get_archives, but I’ve scrapped that now. Now I need to have a first item called “All” which will revert to the parent, full list of posts and each subsequent item in the dropdown is a year.

   <select name="archive-dropdown" onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;"> // standard wp_get_archives dropdown jump functionality
           <option value="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?><?php echo $parent; ?>">All</option> // the "All" option, with the parts formulating the url
           <?php
           $years = $wpdb->get_col("SELECT DISTINCT YEAR(post_date) FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY post_date DESC"); // getting a list of years for all the posts in the category
           foreach($years as $list_year) : 
           if($list_year == $year) {
               $select = ' selected="selected"'; // ensures that the current year stays selected
           } else {
               $select = '';
           } ?>
   
           <option value="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?><?php echo $parent; ?><?php echo $list_year; ?>/"<?php echo $select; ?>><?php echo $list_year; ?></option> // populates the option field
           <?php endforeach; ?>
   </select>
   

   Pretty straightforward stuff. I got most of the dropdown code from: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/archives-by-year-this-is-different

   I probably need to add a category component to the MySQL query.

   Finally, I changed the WP_Query, to include a year attribute. As this is left blank when the parent page is selected, it defaults to latest date. Otherwise, it shows just the year selected:

   $paged = get_query_var( 'paged' ) ? get_query_var( 'paged' ) : false;
   $args = array('cat' => $cat, 'posts_per_page' => '10', 'paged' => $paged, 'year' => $year );
   $query = new WP_Query($args);
   

   Just for good measure, I’ve left in the paging, which I use with the wp_pagenavi plugin.

   The lesson here is that WordPress Multisite archiving is appalling. DIY is much better. I hope this helps someone else out there.

   UPDATE: Have run into major problems with pagination in this regard. There seems to be no easy way around this, though working on a solution. WordPress just does not seem to play nice with category specific archives AND pagination.

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