On 2/27/06, Mike Black said:

>In my page (http://www.mindspill.org) in the main left hand navigation
>I've got a box "Archive" that's what I meant with the monthly archive list.

As I'd been planning a macro to do this anyway (for a long time, now), Mike's request gave me the push I needed to finally 'get it done'.

The macro you need is <!--#weblog.calendar.listMonths--> The links produced by this macro link to the per-month archives in your weblog, and could be used instead of the full weblog calendar.

It's very flexible. By default (that is, with no attributes at all, so it looks like is shown above) it lists all of the months in which the weblog has archives. (The output is an HTML list.) The following is an example of the output (note that it's going to look weird in plain-text email, so please go to the site to see it.)

• March, 2006
• January, 2006
• December, 2005
• August, 2005
• July, 2005
• April, 2005
• March, 2005
• February, 2005
• January, 2005
• July, 2004
• May, 2004
• September, 2003
• August, 2003
• July, 2003
• June, 2003
• May, 2003
• April, 2003
• February, 2003
• December, 2002
• November, 2002

Being 'very flexible' means the macro accepts a lot of attributes. I can't write the docs right now, but here's a list of those attributes it supports:

• channel
• format -- date formatting *
• lang -- date formatting *
• timezoneName -- date formatting *
• preText ( <ul>)
• postText (</ul>)
• noValueText (empty string)
• preWrapper ( <li>)
• postWrapper (</li>)
• separator
• outputFormat
• descending -- should the list go up or down, chronologically?
• links -- should the output include links?
• limit -- restrict the output to the last /limit/ items

* These three are for formatting the dates that are output by the macro, like "March, 2006". See the docs on formatting dates in Conversant.

This is a brand-new macro. If you find something difficult, or can't figure out how to do something, or run into a bug... please report it here on the beta site!

Seth