Expanding Archives

Expanding Archives adds a widget that shows your old posts in an expandable/collapsible format. Each post is categorized under its year and month, so you can expand all the posts in a given month and year.

This plugin comes with very minimal CSS styling so you can easily customize it to match your design.

JavaScript is required. No IE support.

1. 01Upload expanding-archives to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. 02Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. 03Go to Appearance -> Widgets and drag the Expanding Archives widget into your sidebar.

How can I change the appearance of the widget?

The plugin does not come with a settings panel so you have to do this with your own custom CSS. Here are a few examples:

Change the year background colour:

.expanding-archives-title { background: #000000; }

Change the year font colour:

.expanding-archives-title a { color: #ffffff; } How can I limit the results to a specific category?

By default, the widget includes posts in all categories. You can add the following code to a custom plugin or a child theme’s functions.php file to limit the results to posts in a specific category:

add_filter('expanding_archives_get_posts', function(array $args) { $args['cat'] = 2; // Replace with ID of your category. return $args; }); add_filter('expanding_archives_query', function(string $query) { $category = get_category(2); // Replace with ID of your category. if (! $category instanceof \WP_Term) { return $query; } global $wpdb; return " SELECT DISTINCT MONTH(post_date) AS month, YEAR(post_date) AS year, COUNT(id) as post_count FROM {$wpdb->posts} INNER JOIN {$wpdb->term_relationships} ON ({$wpdb->posts}.ID = {$wpdb->term_relationships}.object_id AND {$wpdb->term_relationships}.term_taxonomy_id = 2) WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_date <= now() AND post_type = 'post' GROUP BY month, year ORDER BY post_date DESC "; });