Archiving Content with WordPress

When you create a post on your WordPress blog, you can file that post
under a category that you specify. This feature makes for a nifty archiving
system in which you and your readers can find articles/posts that you’ve
placed within a specific category. Articles you post are also sorted and orga-
nized by date (day/month/year) so that you can easily locate articles that
you posted at a certain time. The archives page on Lisa’s Web site (see it at
http://ewebscapes.com/sitemap) contains a Chronological Archive
section, which has a list of months followed by the content she published in
that particular month and year. If you click a date on that page, a listing of
articles from that month drops down, and each article title is linked to that
article.
You can easily create an archive listing like the one on Lisa’s Sitemap page

by using a WordPress plugin called Clean Archives
Reloaded, which you can find in the WordPress Plugin Directory at http://
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/clean-archives-reloaded. This
plugin is easy to install, and to use it, you just need to create a page and add
a short code segment ([cleanarchivesreloaded]) to the page content;
that code automatically builds a Chronological Archives page that links to all
the content you’ve published on your site. Easy archives!

WordPress archives and organizes your content for you in more ways than

by date and by category. In this section, I give you an overview of the several other ways — then later in this chapter, I show you how you can leverage those archive types to create a dynamic Web site that’s easy to navigate for your readers. The different types of archives and content include

✦ Categories: Create categories of topics in which you can file your
articles so that you can easily archive relevant topics. Many Web sites
display content by category — typically referred to as a magazine
theme, in which all content is displayed by topic, rather than in a simple
chronological listing. Figure 7-2 shows an example of a magazine theme.
You can find out how to create one of your own by using the information
in Book VI; also be sure to check out Book VI, Chapter 6 to discover how
to use template tags and category templates to display category-specific
content — exciting stuff!

 

✦ Tags: Tagging your posts with microkeywords, called tags, further

defines related content within your site, which can improve your site for SEO purposes by assisting the search engines in finding related and relevant content, as well as provide additional navigation to help your readers find relevant content on your site.
✦ Date Based: Your content is automatically archived by date based on
the day, month, year, and time of day you publish it.
✦ Author: Content is automatically archived by author based on the
author of the post and/or page — you can create an author archive if your site has multiple content contributors.
✦ Keyword (or Search): WordPress has a built-in search function that
allows you and your readers to search for keywords, which presents an
archive listing of content that’s relevant to your chosen keywords.
✦ Custom Post Types: You can build custom post types based on the
kind of content your site offers — you can find detailed information on
custom post types and how to create them in Book VI, Chapter 7.
✦ Attachments: WordPress has a built-in media library where you can
upload different media files such as photos, images, documents, videos,
and audio files (to name a few). You can build an archive of those files
to create things such as photo galleries, eBook archives (PDFs), or video
galleries.

✦ Links: Build your own link directory of resources by using the built-in

Link Manager in the WordPress Dashboard, and then create a page to
display the links on your site.