What is this plugin for?

Sooner or later almost every MT blog becomes buried beneath the weight of its own category archives. CatCalendar allows you to split up your blog's category archives into daily, weekly, or monthly archives.

Table of Contents

1. CatCalendar Compatibility
2. Installing CatCalendar
3. Setting up a new archive
4. Changing your old category archive template
5. An sample template
6. Template tags
7. Configuration options

Compatibility

CatCalendar has been tested with MovableType 3.2 - 3.34. This plugin works only for statically published archives.

Installing CatCalendar

Download and unzip CatCalendar-0.6.zip. Put the directory CatCalendar-0.6/plugins/CatCalendar in your plugins directory.

CatCalendar is currently in beta, use it at your own risk. While in beta, it is for personal, non-commercial use only. Please email me if you'd like to use it in some other fashion.

Setting up a new date-based category archive.

1. Go to the Settings page for your weblog and click on the Publishing tab (if you don't see this tab, click the "Switch to Detailed Settings" link on the top right of the settings page.)
2. Scroll down to the "Archive Mapping" section of the page and click "Create New Archive Mapping".
3. Pick your new date-based category type from the "Archive Type" drop-down.
4. Pick a template from the "Template" drop-down. You can use your existing Date-Based Archive template, it'll do just fine.
5. Click "Add".
6. Important: When the page comes back up, take a look at the new archive mapping you've created, and click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page.

Changing your old Category Archive template.

If you have already have category archives setup, you'll probably want to change the template to limit the number of entries that it displays. You might also want to include an archive listing below it:

<MTEntries lastn="15">
	...	
</MTEntries>

<ul>
<MTCategoryArchives type="Category-Monthly">
	<li><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></a></li>
</MTCategoryArchives>
</ul>

Or perhaps you'd just like to redirect your category archive to the most recent archive for the category. If your weblog is hosted in an environment with PHP, you might try something like:

<?PHP 
    header('Location: '.
        <MTCategoryArchives type="Category-Monthly" lastn="1">
        '<$MTArchiveLink$>'</MTCategoryArchives>);
    exit;
?>

Template Tags

CatCalendar uses Movable Type's normal archive template tags. You can use just about any of the MTArchive* (except the MTArchives container tag) and MTCategory* tags. Plus, these tags added in CatCalendar:

MTCategoryArchives

A container tag that creates a context for each of the date archives for a category.

Attributes:

• type - Specifies the type of date archive to list. One of "Category-Daily", "Category-Weekly", "Category-Monthly"
• lastn - Optionally specifies a limit.
• order - Specifies the sort order. One of 'ascend', 'descend'. Default is 'descend'.

MTArchiveFirst

Creates a context for the first (earliest/oldest) date-based archive for the current category.

MTArchiveLast

Creates a context for the last (most recent) date-based archive for the current category.

MTIfCategoryArchivesEnabled

Evaliuates whether date based archiving has been turned off for the current category. (See the configuration settings for more info.)

Template Example

Here is a good suggestion from Byrne for customizing your category archives

Put this at the top of your category-date archive template:

<h2>You are browsing the <$MTArchiveTitle$> category</h2>
<div id="menu">
<MTArchivePrevious><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>">« <$MTArchiveDate
format="%B %Y"$></a> |</MTArchivePrevious>
<a href="<$MTBlogURL$>">Main</a>
<MTArchiveNext>| <a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveDate format="%B
%Y"$> »</a></MTArchiveNext>
</div>

Put this in your category archive:

<h2>Recent Posts in <$MTArchiveTitle$></h2>
<MTEntries include_subcategories="1" lastn="2">
  <$MTEntryExcerpt$>
</MTEntries>

<h2>Browse this Category by Date...</h2>
<ul>
<MTCategoryArchives type="Category-Monthly">
  <li><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveDate format="%B
%Y"$></a></li>
</MTCategoryArchives>
</ul>

Rebuilding your archives

Just like Movable Type's native date-based and category archives, the appropriate archives will be automatically rebuilt when you save an entry.

If you want to rebuild all the date-based category archives for your blog, you can do it through the "Rebuild Site" link in the left-side navigation of your blog.

Configuration Options

CatCalendar will work just fine without you ever touching these. If you need some custom configuration, all the options are available in the blog-specific plugin settings

Rebuild adjacent archives

By default, CatCalendar will rebuild adjacent archives when an archive is rebuilt. I.e., if you save and entry that causes the March 2007 archive for your "Puppies" category to be rebuilt, CatCalendar will also rebuild the February and April archives. This is to preserve the ArchivePrevious and ArchiveNext links across the archives, though you may want to turn it off to speed up rebuilds.

Exclude categories

By default, CatCalendar will create archives for every populated category in your blog. If you have some categories that you do not need date-based archives for, you can do that here. This can be helpful if you have some categories with very few entries, or if you have certain categories that are for internal use.