Symfony2 - Setting up a blog archive

Question

I've been working on trying to setup a blog archive for a blog site where the use clicks on a date and the corresponding posts appear. (see image) I understand I need to retrieve all my blog posts and sort by date, but the steps after that are foggy to me. Taking that data then sorting it by month/year and passing it to a template is the part I am having trouble with.

Can someone shed some light on what I am doing wrong or provide a simple working example?

What I have thus far:

    public function archiveAction()
    {
        $em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();

//        $query = $em->getRepository('AcmeProjectBundle:Blog')
//            ->findAll();

        $blogs = $em->getRepository('AcmeProjectBundle:Blog')
            ->getLatestBlogs();

        if (!$blogs) {
            throw $this->createNotFoundException('Unable to find blog posts');
        }

        foreach ($blogs as $post) {
            $year = $post->getCreated()->format('Y');
            $month = $post->getCreated()->format('F');
            $blogPosts[$year][$month][] = $post;
        }

//        exit(\Doctrine\Common\Util\Debug::dump($month));

        return $this->render('AcmeProjectBundle:Default:archive.html.twig', array(
            'blogPosts' => $blogPosts,
        ));
    }

Answer 1

You want to tell your archiveAction which month was actually clicked, so you need to one or more parameters to it: http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/controller.html#route-parameters-as-controller-arguments (I would do something like /archive/{year}/{month}/ for my parameters, but it's up to you.) Then when someone goes you myblog.com/archive/2014/04, they would see those posts.

Next, you want to show the posts for that month. For this you'll need to use the Doctrine Query builder. Here's one SO answer on it, but you can search around for some more that pertain to querying for dates. Select entries between dates in doctrine 2