I know this is minor, but I thought some of you might like to know that I've updated the outline of Weblog II macros with new documentation for the weblog.calendar.dayCssClass macro.

It has some nifty overrides, if you're into that sort of thing. :-)

I know there are a few people on this list who don't follow the Free-Conversant support site.

There is some important new software in beta, now, and you can get all of the details in these two messages:

New Pattern Wizards - Beta Test

and

Second Site Configuration Wizard: Pattern Installer

Hoping to get the ball rolling, there's also a sample pattern available, based on a site design from Bryan Bell (which he created for Clark Venable).

I'm hoping (or rather, planning) that there will be lots of patterns created. They'll make it very easy to customize and personal a site (including a Weblog II page), especially since it's possible to mix-and-match patterns.

Hey all,

I've just rolled out some new features for all of the servers.

First up is the Monthly Archives feature. Go to the one of your weblog's archive pages (anything with a date in the URL), and then take off the last "/" (forward slash) and the day.

Here's an example. Start at this URL on my site:

<http://www.truerwords.net/index/2005/04/07>

Now, take off the "/07" from that URL, so you go to this page:

<http://www.truerwords.net/index/2005/04>

There you can see everything that I've posted in the month of April, 2005.

The technical side of this feature is done: it renders all of the items from the specified month. However, there are still some things that need polishing up:

• I think a site should offer either daily (old-style) or monthly archives, but not both. It's just too darn many URLs, and too much server load. There's no point to having both. (Monthly archives are good, and they keep us compatible with some of the other big names like Moveable Type.)
• More calendar-related macros are needed so that, if you're using monthly archives, you can produce a list of archive months. Probably something like weblog.calendar.listMonths, or perhaps weblog.calendar.years (where each year would then use a template to display its months).
• The channel month archives don't stop at the end of the month. Oops. They only show content from the channel, but they show as many days as are on the main weblog (the default channel).

New Conditionals

There are three new conditional macros, for determining if the page that was requested is from the weblog archives.

• weblog.request.isArchive
• weblog.request.isArchiveDay
• weblog.request.isArchiveMonth

isArchiveDay returns true if the requested URL specifies a day, like the first URL I provided near the top of this message.

isArchiveMonth returns true if the requested URL specifies a month, like the second URL above.

isArchive returns true if either of the other are true. It's identical to doing "weblog.request.isArchiveDay || weblog.request.isArchiveMonth". However, if we ever add another archive format -- perhaps an archive year, or topical archives? -- then isArchive will still return true in those archive formats. (In other words, isArchive will always going to be the most generic test.)

Comments and Questions, please! It's too quiet around here, and we're getting very close to the end of my To Do list...

Seth