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RSSBest Wordpress Plugins: Clean Archives
Blogs that focus on timeless content should archive the posts by categories. Calendars and monthly archives are not optimal since the reader is not able filter the posts by the topics of his interest.
That being said sometimes a comprehensive archive where all the posts are listed, month by month, can be useful. Maybe the reader is looking for something that was written two weeks ago, or maybe he wants to grasp all the older posts from your blog.
The best solution for this problem is a Wordpress plugin called Clean Archives. You just need to upload the plugin, activate it and drop a line of code on the page that you want the archives to be displayed. You can see the plugin working here.
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This archives plugin is good, but having a page like that you might as well turn into a sitemap.
Sitemaps have links to every post, category, etc. This not only gives a comprehensive Table of Contents to your whole site, but is also a massive strength for indexing and SEO.
Chris Pearson wrote an excellent post on sitemap setup. It’s not a plugin so a little more work than just dropping and activating, but you’ll save your blog the strain of ‘one more plugin’.
Excellent plugin. Coincidentally I got it working on my site right before this post came up.
I find that it makes a very functional site map for blogs.
Veron, yeah I implemented it recently also when I got the blog redesigned. It does provice a very efficient and quick way to navigate all the posts on a blog.
Goofed up the link to Chris’s post. Here it is:
http://www.pearsonified.com/20.....dexing.php
Daniel — Your archive list leaves no doubt that “daily” blog tips is an understatement since many days have multiple posts. It was a good visual reminder of your over-promise, under-deliver discussion.
(Shawn’s link to Chris Pearson’s sitemap post appeared broken. Perhaps it was a link to this site:
http://www.pearsonified.com/20.....dexing.php
)
Mark, I glad you remember the “underpromise and overdeliver” stuff!
Shawn, sitemaps are an useful feature if your blog is having problems to getting indexed correctly. Actually there is a debate on the SEO sphere regarding this topic.
I have used the Wordpress plugin that generates sitemaps in the past. I havent noticed any improvements apart from my pages getting indexed faster.
If you do have indexation problems though then yeah a sitepoint should help to solve it.
Daniel,
Thanks for the tip. I got it working fine on my blog as a separate page (/archives).
Do you know how I can restrict the number of months on the page and have the rest come up on subsequent pages e.g. /archives/2/ ? I’ve been blogging for almost four years now and close to 2000 posts so loading up the archives pages takes long and is one heck of a long page.
Patrix, that is a problem I was worried about also! Not sure how to fix that, try to contact that guy who coded the plugin, and let me know if you get any solution for this.
Daniel, I’ve tried to use the plugin on my site but I’m obviously doing something wrong. I have created a new page in the dashboard and included this: in the post, but what shows up is instead of an archive. Any ideas?
Oops.. what I’m trying to say is that I only see the php command on the page. For some reason, it seems to read it as text rather than code. Any ideas would be really appreciated.
Dave, make sure to use the “code” text editor instead of the “visual” one. You can change this on the WP control panel under “options” and “users”, then just disable the visual rich editor.
but i prefer extended live archives. it is more organized.
It’s worth noting that to use this you may need to install runPHP which will then give you an option at the bottom of the right hand navigation panel when writing a page/post to ‘run PHP code?’.
Amos
Amos, yeah you might need to do that. Alternatively you can also create a special page template for the archives.
Daniel and Amos, I got it working. Finding the code editor was a bit of a problem. It’s the default (only) editor in Safari. I did need runPHP. My final hitch was that somehow in the process I ended up with a space where there wasn’t supposed to be one. Removed space and… voila a clean achive page… thanks you guys.
I just put this in, and I like it – a simple, effective, plugin that gives a real benefit.
Not sure how it will cope when I get to 500 posts though.
Matt
Dan, an idea for your next post. A tip on how to write your own templates? You can use the Clean Archives plugin as an example. I did it myself, but it did take a whole 2 mins to work out first.
I agree with the earlier commentor that this plugin is basically a sitemap. if you have a blog older than a year or two, or if you post more than a few times a month I don’t think this plugin will be suitable as it will only create a long page that no-one is going to read.
I use the Extended Live Archives plugin which you can see in action here. This allows readers to hone in on the posts (over 1000) they want to read by being able to search by year, month and more importantly by category or tag.
I recently took over the development of the SRG Clean Archives plugin and released version 3.0 which was a complete rewrite of the code with a lot of optimizations and some added features.
In the coming week version 3.1 will be out with some other things to handle huge amounts of posts.
Currently I have over 700 posts on my site and it just zips along.
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Ooops.. This is what I am looking for. Can’t find in the wordpress.org plugin database. Thanks to google who brought me here.
are those plug ins working for a non paid wordpress. I mean my wordpress blog (url and hosting) is still hosted in wordpress server
Thank you
i wish i ad a website like this one.very useful info
Okay, this is fairly cool. But what would you have to do to get it to display only thumbnail photos of your posts rather than the headline? Then you could have an option to go to page 2, 3 etc or set how many posts are displayed per page?
It seems nothing like this exists anywhere and would be very useful.