The Menu Format

First off, there’s a new format called “menu”. It’s basically the year and month menu from the fancy format, but without the post list. It’s meant to be displayed on year and month based archives, to aid navigation.

Usually, those archives are handled by the archive.php template in your theme, so that’s where you should use it:

<?php smart_archives('format=menu'); ?>

New arguments

There are also two new arguments:

month_format – can be one of ‘numeric’, ’short’ and ‘long’

posts_per_month – set the number of posts displayed per month; by default, all posts are displayed.

<?php smart_archives('posts_per_month=25'); ?>

Finally, you can now customize the look and feel more easily. See Advanced Tweaking.

Custom styling

If you want to customize the appearance of the archives using your own CSS, here’s how you do it:

1. Add this code to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_filter('smart_archives_load_default_styles', create_function('', 'return false;'));

2. Copy everything from smart-archives-reloaded/inc/styles.dev.css into your theme’s style.css file.
3. Change the CSS in your theme’s style.css file, as needed.

Custom markup

If you want to go one step further and change the generated HTML markup, you can do that too (understanding of object inheritance is required).

First, take a look at the SAR_Generator class (in smart-archives-reloaded/generator.php).

In your theme’s functions.php file, you can extend that class, like so:

smart_archives_load_default_generator();
 
class SAR_Custom_Generator extends SAR_Generator {
	protected static function generate_fancy() {
		// your custom code here
	}
 
	protected static function generate_block() {
		// more of your custom code here
	}
 
	...
}

Then, all you have to do is add the ‘generator’ argument to the template tag:

<?php smart_archives('generator=SAR_Custom_Generator'); ?>

Version 1.8 is a lot more developer friendly: any options set on the settings page can be overwritten:

In your theme, you can now write:

<?php smart_archives('format=list&exclude_cat=123,543'); ?>

This works for the shortcode too. In any post or page, just write:

[smart_archives format=list exclude_cat=123,543]

What’s neat about this is that you can have more than one archive, or have the archive display differently in different parts of your site.

Fancy new style

Version 1.7 adds an integrated multi-level navigation UI to the archives, perfect for sites with a large number of posts.

See a live example.

New formatting tags

First, you have %category_link% and %category%, which will output a category list for each post.

Secondly, you have %date%, wich will print out the publish date of each post. There is an additional field where you can customize the date format.

If you like the new features, go thank Simon for his effort.

• Belarusian – ilyuha
• Chinese – Yorick Chen
• Danish – jos
• French – Référenceur Freelance
• Italian – Gianni Diurno
• Russian – Fat Cow
• Uzbek – Alexandra Bolshova

In version 1.6 you can better control how each post is displayed in the list:

Also, the admin page has been rearanged in a more logical order: general settings and specific settings.

The plugin is now fully translatable.

Finally, the cache file is now located in the uploads directory, so that you don’t have to mess with file permissions anymore.

Also, an issue with accents should be fixed.

Finally, some optimizations were also baked in.

PHP5 is required

• new: month links in the block can point to month titles in the list.
• new: validate excluded categories input
• fix: block respects excluded categories option
• new: uses scbOptionsPage framework 1.0
• fix: single wp-cron event when changing cache interval
• fix: redundant calls to displaySAR::generate()

PHP5 is required.

• Easy setup – no code editing required
• Better caching – no need to wait when publishing a new post
• Settings page – elegantly choose how you want the archives displayed

Version history

• 1.2: better HTML output; various optimizations and bugfixes
• 1.1: switched to wp_cron for updating the cache
• 1.0: initial release