How to create a monthly archive block for a Drupal blog with Views

What does a monthly archive block achieve?

I'm not sure how many people actually visit archive links for blogs. It seems like there are more natural groupings of posts, either by tag or the basic pagination, so I think it's likely not a terribly useful browsing pattern. However, there's three things do like about them:

1. It makes it easier for other people to track your posting frequency
2. It makes it easier to track your own posting frequency
3. It helps distributes internal link juice in a permanent way

From what I've heard - and almost all my SEO knowledge comes second-hand - one commonly overlooked method of improving the ranking of a page is using internal links well. Google sees each URL as its own entity, so in addition to garnering incoming links to boost the PageRank of a page, you can also use internal PageRank and it works the same way.

The idea is that each page has a bucket of rank to pass out. If you pass that rank around internally, you can get a nice boost in overall ranking. But, it's important that the links stay constant on a page, since Google tracks the age of links. So while taxonomy pages do a good job of passing out links, the links on their pages may change if they're sorting from newest to oldest.

Archive pages, on the other hand, will always have the same links on each page, so if this internal linking theory is valid, it's a good method to use.

How to set up the archive blog and pages with Views - The easy way

After I put together this blog post, a reader mentioned that there is an archive view that comes bundled with Views. I gave it a test run and it had enough of the same properties of my archive view that I'm pretty sure I must have just cloned it a year or two ago. So, if you want to go the easy way, just enable that and configure it to your liking. If you're wondering how it works or want to set it up manually, read on.

How to set up the archive blog and pages with Views - The manual way

Even though Drupal doesn't come bundled with an archive view like Wordpress, it's pretty easy to set one up with Views.

First, create a new view and add a Block display. 

Set the display to show a high number of items. I want all months to display, so I have it set to 30 for now. The screenshot is from Views 3 Alpha:

Set the filters to match whatever is showing up in your blog. In my case, it's just nodes that are a blog content type.

Next, we need to add an argument for year and month. So, click on the plus sign next to the argument box and select Node: Created year + month:

Next, we just need to select Summary, sorted ascending under Action to take if argument is not present:

You could also select Summary, sorted descending if you wanted the most recent month to display at the top.

By default, the list of months will display as a list with the number of posts per month. This is how I have mine set, and with a little styling it looks like this:

There are a few other options which you can explore by clicking on the link next to Style, which will be List by default and taking a look at the options:

The Jump Menu option sounds neat, but I couldn't get it to work with Views 3 Alpha.

Setting up the archive page

First, add a Page display.

Give the page display a URL:

From what I can tell - and it's been a while since I set this up - the only difference with the Page view is that I've set a title in the argument settings. So, click the override button to make sure this change doesn't apply to the defaults, and then click the edit link for Node: Created year + month and set %1 for the title.

You can test out this page view as long as you have some blog items already. In the Live preview section, add an argument in the YYYYMM format, like so:

In the example above, you would see a list of nodes for July, 2010.

Save the view and then set the block to display using either the block admin page (/admin/build/block) or Context (definitely check out the Context module if you haven't yet for block display settings, it makes SO much more sense). 

That's it, you should be good to go!