Categorising posts/pages into years published

Question

I have a lot of posts/pages, and I would like to create a list in my sidebar, showing all of the years that I have created posts/pages in, so for instance, if I have 5 posts/pages that were spaced out over 5 years, from 2006 to 2011, each year having one post, I would like 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 to show as list items in the sidebar, as links to all of the posts/pages created that year.

Any idea of how I can achieve that?

Thanx in advance!

Answer 1

Not sure if there's a specific function for this as i didn't find anything with a quick search, but i went ahead and wrote a function to do the job, feel free to expand upon it or do whatever you like with it.

List year archives for published posts of a type

Code is provided "as is", do as you will with it.

function get_years_for_type( $type = 'post', $echo = false, $sep = '<br />' ) {
    global $wpdb, $wp_post_types;

    $type = '' == $type ? 'post' : $type;

    if( !isset( $wp_post_types[$type] ) )
        return;

    $q = $wpdb->get_col( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT YEAR(post_date) as year FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = %s AND post_status = 'publish' GROUP by year", $type ) );

    if( empty( $q ) )
        return;

    $y = array();
    foreach( $q as $year )
        $y[] = '<a href="' . get_year_link( $year ) . '">' . $year . '</a>';

    $y = implode( $sep, $y );

    if( $echo )
        echo $y;
    else
        return $y;
}

Example usage:

// Output list of years for pages
echo get_years_for_type( 'page' );
get_years_for_type( 'page', true ); 

// Output list of years for posts
echo get_years_for_type();
get_years_for_type( 'post', true ); 

// Storing the result in a variable
$var = get_years_for_type(); // post is assumed for type when none set

// Using an alternate seperator for the links
echo get_years_for_type( 'post', false, ' | ' );    
get_years_for_type( 'post', true, ' | ' );

Hope that helps..

Answer 2

There is decent native function wp_get_archives() for such, but unfortunately native archives widget doesn't use all of it and is limited to monthly archives.

Take a look at Widgets Reloaded plugin, it replaces native widgets with more configurable versions.