On Snowy Day Coding

There’s a new version of WordPress out today, and I’ll probably download it and upgrade this weekend. After the experience of moving to WordPress 2.8 — which wasn’t pleasant — I’m a little cautious.

The main issue with that upgrade — the WordPress memory bloat — was resolved in one of the bugfix releases. It’s still a massive piece of software, but that probably can’t be helped.

And, while I haven’t upgraded my WordPress install, I have spent my morning working with PHP code, and I cobbled together a WordPress plugin.

What I wanted was a different way of displaying archives. I wanted a calendar view for archives, much like LiveJournal does, where you can get a yearly calendar, with links on each day to posts for that day.

WordPress can do that, but only on a month-by-month basis.

I took one plugin, the Calendar Cloud Plugin, and I was able to merge that with a routine that called WordPress’ calendar code. I had to experiment, to figure out how to pass the get_calendar function the month and year; it’s not written in such a way that you can, but I discovered there was a way to trick it. Then, trial and error to figure out the right way to make the string for the “trick.”

And that worked. I had a table of monthly calendars. But that didn’t really work the way I wanted — it gave me “next” and “previous” links at the bottom of each month’s calendar. So I took the code for the get_calendar function, copied it into my plugin, renamed the function, and stripped out the code for the next and previous links.

That worked.

Then it was just a question of getting the calendars styled.

I like the final result. It does what I want, and it looks good.