Plugin Page
SRG Clean Archives
Description
It’s a simple plug-in designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion.
Features
It lists the Month / Year (links to that months archives), the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article
(permalink to article), and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
It also hides password protected articles from showing up in your archives list.
Future Plans
– Adding an admin configuration area to the WP dashboard.
– Turn on/off comments and comment counts showing in the output display
– Implementing a way to have only the posts in certain categories show up.
Review
I’ve chosen to feature this plugin because it shows a lot of promise for the future. The plugin developments changed hands recently and the new author has already planned a roadmap for the plugin.
Clean Archives simply lists all the posts that you have made in a monthly fashion. This works as a great sitemap as also doubles up as a method for a visitor to go through your entire archives without having to browse page by page.
There isn’t much to write about the plugin except that it does what it is supposed to do.
The installation is easy, but after that you need to create an archives page and embed the code to display the archives. You can also display the archives in the sidebar.
Few things that I would like to see is to first display only the months and when the user clicks on it, the posts of that month should be loaded.
Another good feature would be the auto addition of the plugin page, without the need for the user to create the page.
Do you have any suggestions? It would be a great to encourage the development of this plugin.
Thanks for the review Ajay.
A few of the “road map” things have been added and are in the current release for download.
The admin page is now in place which allows you to turn on and off comment count display.
Things to be watching for in the near future include being able to adjust the archive output from the plugin admin page, so there won’t be a need to mess with your style sheet or the plugin source file.
Turning on and off display of RSS post/comment subscribe for each post and the auto addition of the plugin page as you suggested.
The goal is to have everything controlled from the plugin admin page and make it very easy for people to use this plugin.
The code and queries will continue to be optimized as the plugin grows in features.
Of course I am open for any and all suggestions. Thanks again for the mention and review.
P.S. Your suggestion to “display only the months and when the user clicks on it, the posts of that month should be loaded” is now on the top of the to-do list.
I’m thinking in the coming week a new release will be available with the things discussed so far.
Thanks for reviewing this. I have been using this plugin for a while and it perfectly fits the bill for a sitemap. I in fact even removed my original sitemap in its favor. I’m also glad the author fixed the bug[in a day] in 3.0 that drastically increased load time.
I would love to be able to figure out how to add pagination to my archive pages. THAT would be a really cool feature. 🙂
@gestroud: With the feature that Ajay suggested “Display only the months and when the user clicks on it, the posts of that month will be loaded” that would solve the issue of a really long page for archives with a lot of posts covering many years but I can also maybe add a feature for pagination.
How would you suggest it work? Once you click a month, you get a page for all the posts on that month?
@Patrix: Thanks for your support and use of the plugin. If/when other bugs or issues come up, I’ll do my best to have them resolved just as quickly as the one you mention.
With Jquery and Accordion Jquery plugin, it would be nice to show only the month you want : this plugin is perfect when you have 100 or 200 articles … when you begin to have more than 1000, JS possibilities are required 🙂 very good plugin.
ive been using this plugin for a while, but i just saw the new version the other day. i have yet to update it. 😀
This is an awesome plugin. I am glad to see it getting a bit more publicity.
@Pallab: Thanks for your support. If you like the latest version, wait until you see what’s coming soon with version 4. I might have a 3.1 version prior to the 4.0 release. It depends on how much I get done over the weekend 🙂
going to check it out this sunday!
I prefer use the Extended Live Archives
ELA is of course better : but very buggy, nomore updated since the first version of WP 2.x, and no more support, even on the FlickR official forum. At least, bots can’t visit archives with this Ajax interface : so … time for someone to reborn the project 🙂
Indeed Extended Live Archives has some nice features but you’ll want to keep your eye out for SRG Clean Archives 4.0 which is coming in about a week or less after a little more testing. I’m taking the best things from various other archive plugins and making SRG Clean Archives really robust.
Very curious to see this 🙂 but it’s true ELA was an UFO : Ajax and very intuitive, with no scroll 🙂 I’ll bookmark your site to see the features, in this case 🙂
Great plugin.. I cannot wait for the “expand month” or pagination feature.. With over 3000 posts in one year, it’d be a very heavy server load to include them all!
Thanks and look forward to it.
@Hoboken411: Heads up my 4.0 version with expanding month feature will be released within the next 24 hours or less.