Comments on: Making monthly archive dropdown lists in WordPress

By: John

John — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 22:27:37 +0000

Actually, that sounds like a decent idea. If your design has room for a distinctive “menu bar” between your page’s title and your main content, perhaps using a contrasting background colour, that would seem to be a natural place for a search box and maybe also drop-down lists of archives by month and category. You could think of it as a filter for the entries that follow.

Something to consider next time I’m playing with a new design…

[Incidentally, following your comment above I've now set up a permanent redirect of my old RSS feeds' addresses to point at the new feeds, so any other old readers who haven't deleted my feed from their aggregator are about to find out that I'm still around. Thanks again for reminding me of my omission.]

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:08:48 +0000

One thought – some skin designers, annoyed at having too narrow a space for the search box, have put it at the foot or head of the page, and are no longer restricted by the column – maybe this isn’t intuitive enough a place for many users, though.

By: John

John — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 18:42:51 +0000

Unfortunately my switch to WordPress was forced on me by a corrupted Movable Type database, and in the rush to get WP up and running I put “sort out a transition from old to new RSS feed addresses” on my to-do list but somehow never actually got round to doing anything about it. Now that you’ve reminded me of my (very embarrassing!) omission I’ll have to get that sorted out.

I’ve no intention of ditching the Go button on the archives drop-down; I can certainly live with the current arrangement. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t blame anyone for browsing with Javascript turned off nowadays – especially if they’re using a browser without any popup handlers – so I’ll do my best to keep the site usable even if it isn’t quite as pretty. (In any case the next time I feel the need to switch layouts I may just end up with a wider sidebar. Come to think of it, if I ever put by blogroll back up – yet another task that got lost in the shuffle during the MT-WP transition – I’m definitely going to need a wider sidebar anyway.)

Anyway, I’m glad my comment has brought my continued existence to your attention.

By: Neto Cury

Neto Cury — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 02:27:04 +0000

Hi, i am brazilian blogger, and i just installed the hack, congratullations, its wonderfull.
Why not create an dropdown list for Categories too?
Thanks a lot!

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 22:31:28 +0000

John, I was wondering why your RSS feed had dried up – didn’t know you’d switched over and was still using the old URL! Anyway, yes, the sidebar often doesn’t accomodate it very well – I had to shrink the drop-down and make the button as tiny as possible to work on mine. Dispensing with the button altogether may make it look nicer, though it will break the form for anyone without JS…

By: John

John — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 21:39:15 +0000

Thanks for posting this: it was just what I was looking for. I’d rather the Go button was on the same line as the drop-down list, but I assume that’s a function of my relatively narrow sidebar not having room for both.

By: Armand

Armand — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 13:12:23 +0000

Works well, many thanks. As you’ll see from my blog, the “go” button doesn’t look good… trying to work out how to get rid of it, wisdom appreciated…