Archives page template
Rural Blog ships a page template that prints an index of every published post, newest first, grouped by year and then by month. Titles only.
Making one
- Pages → Add New. Title it
Archives(or Index, or All posts). - In the page settings sidebar, open Page → Template and choose Archives.
- Publish.
That is the whole setup. The index is generated; there is nothing to keep up to date.
Add it to your footer menu — it is exactly the kind of link that belongs there.
What it looks like
The year heads each group. Under it, each month sits to the left with that month’s post titles running down the right in one column. The effect is a timeline: a reader can see how much you published in 2023 versus 2024 at a glance, and reach any post in one click.
On a phone the months step back above their lists, so the index stays readable without horizontal scrolling.
Your own words go on top
Whatever you write in the page itself is printed above the index, in the normal
.entry-content, with all the block styling. Use it for a paragraph of
introduction, or a note about what is and is not in the archive.
Leave the page empty and the index starts directly under the title — no empty wrapper, no stray spacing.
Options
Customize → Blog → Archives page year — where the year sits.
| Choice | |
|---|---|
| On top (default) | The year is a heading above its months, which sit flush left |
| Inline | The year takes a margin of its own beside the months |
On top is the default because it hands that margin’s width back to the titles on a narrow page, and it is what the index already does on a phone. Inline is the more architectural look and wants a full-width layout.
Either way the months keep their own two-column arrangement, and phones stack it.
The page also takes a layout like any other page — from Customize → Page → Layout, or the Layout radios in the Page options box for this page alone. A sidebar works fine here.
Details worth knowing
- Posts only, published only. Pages, attachments and custom post types are not listed.
- No comments. A discussion under a table of contents has nowhere to go.
- No thumbnails or excerpts. The page exists to scan a whole blog at a glance; a picture per row would turn a one-screen index back into the endless list the visitor came here to escape.
- One query for the lot, with the caches it does not need switched off. Fine
for a few thousand posts. Past that, a child theme can cap or filter it with
rural_blog_archives_index_args— see Hooks and filters. - An untitled post is listed as (Untitled) rather than as a bullet pointing nowhere.
Related
- Pagination — the other way to reach old posts
- Page layout