Compact archives for sNews 1.7

Anyone that's running sNews and writes as many articles as me has no doubt encountered the limitations of the current archives page. Basically it's just an enormously long chronological list.

Here's a handy little replacement function to display the archives by year, with clickable months if in fact the month contains articles. A user can click a specific month to view listings from only that month, or by year to view the entire year's articles. View my archives page for a demo.

First add the following to your language file;

#compact archives
$l['archive_by_date'] = 'By Date';

Now upload your language file.

OK, now for the logic, this is a simple drop-in replacement archive function, so the first step is ...as always... BACK-UP your snews.php file and work off of a copy. Now find the function archive and rename it, I always append "_orig" when renaming function, so I can easily go back, so rename it archive_orig. Now copy the new archive function into your snews.php file, again, I always put new functions at the bottom just above the closing php tag when possible, to separate from the original core code.

// ARCHIVE - COMPACT STYLE
function archive($start = 0, $size = 200) {
    echo '<h2><a href="'._SITE.'archive/">'.l('archive').'</a>';
    $break =  explode("/",cleanXSS($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
    $count = count($break);
    $months = array("1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12");
    if (in_array($break[$count-2], $months)) { //month is requested
        $year = $break[$count-3];
        $month = $break[$count-2];
    } elseif(strlen($break[$count-2]) == '4') {//just the year requested
        $year = $break[$count-2];
    }
    if ($year >= '1900' && $year <= date('Y')) { // not a BS year
        $a1 = " AND YEAR(date) = $year";
        echo ' / <a href="'._SITE.'archive/'.$year.'/">'.$year.'</a>';
    }
    if (checkdate($month,1,2001)) { // not a BS month
        $date_placeholder = strtotime("$month/01/2001");
        $a2 = " AND MONTH(date)=$month";
        $month_name = strftime("%B", $date_placeholder); // Full month name, based on the locale
        echo ' / '.$month_name;
    }
    if (!$a1 && !$a2) { // YEAR/Month not set, display front page
        echo '</h2><h6>'.l('archive_by_date').'</h6><div class="archive_date"><p>';
        $query = "SELECT DISTINCT YEAR(date) AS year FROM "._PRE."articles a, "._PRE."categories c
        WHERE a.published='1'
            AND a.visible='YES'
            AND c.published='YES'
            AND a.category=c.id
            AND a.date <= NOW()
        ORDER BY year DESC";
        $result = mysql_query($query);
        while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
            $i = "0";
            $year = $row['year'];
            echo '<a href="'._SITE.'archive/'.$year.'/" title="'.$year.'">'.$year.'</a> ';
            $month_query = "SELECT DISTINCT MONTH(date) AS month FROM "._PRE."articles a, "._PRE."categories c
            WHERE YEAR(date) = '$year'
                AND a.published='1'
                AND a.visible='YES'
                AND c.published='YES'
                AND a.category=c.id
                AND a.date <= NOW()
            ORDER BY month ASC";
            $month_result = mysql_query($month_query);
            $rows = array();
            while($r = mysql_fetch_assoc($month_result)) {array_push($rows, $r);}
                for ($month = 1; $month <= 12; $month += 1) {
                    $date_placeholder = strtotime("$month/01/2001");
                    $month_name = strftime("%B", $date_placeholder); // Full month name, based on the locale
                    $month_abbrev = strftime("%b", $date_placeholder);// Abbreviated month name, based on the locale
                    if ($rows[$i]['month'] == $month) {
                        echo ' <a href="archive/'.$year."/".$month.'/" title="'.$month_name.' '.$year.'">'.strtolower($month_abbrev).'</a> ';
                        $i++;
                    } else {
                        echo ' '.strtolower($month_abbrev).' ';
                    }
                }
            echo "<br />";  
        }
        echo '</p></div>';
    } else { // Year and/or Month selected, display the appropriate articles
        echo '</h2>';
        $query = 'SELECT id FROM '._PRE.'articles'.'
        WHERE position = 1
            AND published = 1
            AND visible = \'YES\'
            '.$a1.'
            '.$a2.'
        ORDER BY date DESC
        LIMIT '."$start, $size";
    
        $result = mysql_query($query);
        $count = mysql_num_rows($result);
        if ($count === 0) {
            echo '<p>'.l('no_articles').'</p>';
        } else {
            while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
                $or_id[] = 'a.id ='.$r['id'];
            }
            $or_id = implode(' OR ',$or_id);
            $query = 'SELECT
                title,a.seftitle AS asef,a.date AS date,
                c.name AS name,c.seftitle AS csef,
                x.name AS xname,x.seftitle AS xsef
            FROM '._PRE.'articles'.' AS a
            LEFT OUTER JOIN '._PRE.'categories'.' as c
                ON category = c.id
            LEFT OUTER JOIN '._PRE.'categories'.' as x
                ON c.subcat =  x.id
            WHERE ('.$or_id.')
                AND a.published = 1
                AND c.published =\'YES\'
                AND (x.published =\'YES\' || x.published IS NULL)
            ORDER BY date DESC
                LIMIT '."$start, $size";
            $result = mysql_query($query);
            $month_names = explode(', ', l('month_names'));
            echo '<div class="arc_list"><p>';
            while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
                $year = substr($r['date'], 0, 4);
                $month = substr($r['date'], 5, 2) -1;
                $day = substr($r['date'], 8, 2);
                $month_name = (substr($month, 0, 1) == 0) ? $month_names[substr($month, 1, 1)] : $month_names[$month];
                if ($last <> $year.$month) {
                    echo '<strong>'.$month_name.', '.$year.'</strong><br />';
                }
                $last = $year.$month;
                $link = isset($r['xsef']) ? $r['xsef'].'/'.$r['csef'] : $r['csef'];
                echo l('divider').' <a href="'._SITE.$link.'/'.$r['asef'].'/">
                '.$r['title'].' ('.$r['name'].')</a><br />';
            }
            echo'</p></div>';
        }
    }
}

OK, now upload your modified sNews.php file and then check out your archive page, it should look similar to mine now.

You may also add styles to your archive, the DIV containing the date list on the front page has a class of archive_date, and the actual article listings are inside a div with the class of arc_list, these are the styles I use, feel free to use this code if you like;

.archive_date p {
line-height:1.6em;
font-family:"lucida console";
font-size:1.1em;
text-transform:uppercase;
text-align:justify;
}
.arc_list p {
text-align:left;
}
.arc_list p a {
color:#386E80;
}