Lots of goodies in this release, based on the feedback and requests I got from you guys (and gals).

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.