New Feature: Blog Archive

I have been looking for a way to get an archive list of blog posts, sort of like what you see form some of the popular blog systems like WordPress or BlogSpot.

The Drupal Archive module gets close. It displays a calendar (that is always open) with links to content lists for that day. It's close, but not nearly as convenient as clicking a single link for a year & month.

There aren't any other modules that provide this function out of the box so I had to turn elsewhere. Then I found the Views module. For those who don't know, Views is a way of dynamically building lists and other groups of content for display in pages or blocks. You can filter the query for any content attribute, e.g. user, owner, tag, and content type. Combine that last one with CCK and you get some really powerful dynamic content management.

In a matter of about 15 minutes I had exactly what I wanted. An archive of blog content rolled up by month and year with number of blog entries in parentheses. You can see the block over on the right side bar.