Flexo Archives

This is something I hear a lot about in connection with the plugin, but it isn’t the widget’s fault. While the widget creates and hides the lists used, the colors and bullet shapes of the lists are set by your theme’s stylesheet. Your theme probably doesn’t have rules in its stylesheet to match the nested lists generated.

To test whether the problem is your theme, temporarily configure your blog to use another WordPress theme, such as the Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven themes provided with WordPress. Expand and contract a few year links in the sidebar. If things don’t look odd, the problem is probably with your theme.

If your WordPress theme supports widgets, you don’t need to worry about the standalone function. You can stop reading now. Congratulations!

Unfortunately, some WordPress themes don’t support widgets. If you are familiar with HTML though, the standalone Flexo Archives function exists to allow you to easily modify your theme to get the expanding archives list provided by the widget.

To use the standalone Flexo Archives function, install the plugin code as described in the first step of the installation instructions.

Next, enable the standalone function:

1. 01Go to the WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Settings’ menu. In recent versions of WordPress, this menu is near the bottom of the left column.
2. 02Click the ‘Flexo Archives’ option in the expanded menu.
3. 03Enable the standalone function using the checkbox and submit the form.

Finally, modify your theme to use the standalone function. Edit the PHP of your theme to add the following code where you want the archives list to appear:

<?php if (function_exists('flexo_standalone_archives')){flexo_standalone_archives();} ?>

The code will output the nested archive lists into the HTML at that point in the theme and automatically attach JavaScript to make the lists expand and contract.