Joomla archive tutorial

Friday, 26 September 2008

Joomla archive has limited functionality in both 1.0 and 1.5 versions.

In the next steps we'll show you how to setup Joomla archive and how to display archived content items in your Joomla! website.

Joomla articles can have 4 states:

published - the articles will be visible to your visitors if you link them to a menu like article, blog view, sections or category listings
unpublished - the articles will not be normally accesible for your visitors(this is possible on a menu item basis, we'll see later how it's done)
archived - the articles will only be accessible through a special archive menu item and/or the archive module
trashed - the article cannot be accessed by your visitors, they are only visible in Joomla administration.

What about expired articles?

You can set a "Finish publishing" date on Joomla articles. If the "finish publishing" date of an article is in the past, that article "expired". An expired article cannot be viewed/accessed by your website's visitors.

When an article expires, Joomla does NOT archive it. It just doesn't show it anymore. It will not show it as a search result either.

What articles are shown when clicking a menu item, and how are they displayed your site is determined by adding and configuring menu items.

How does Joomla handle archive?

Each article(content item) can be manually archived by using Joomla administration

To do this, login into Joomla administration and select

Content->article manager (if using Joomla 1.5)

or Content->All content items (if using Joomla 1.0)

Next, check the Articles you want to archive, and press the "Archive" button in the toolbar. Now your archived articles will not be visible in blog view, section listings, category listings.

The articles are logically marked as "old", and accessing regular menu items will not show them anymore.

The archived articles, will, however, be accesible by using Joomla search, and through a separate archive menu item and/or the Archive module.

To create an archive menu item into a menu, you need to go to "Menu"(in Joomla admin), click your menu of choice (usually mainmenu) and click the "New" button. Then, you need to select an "archive" menu type from the "Content|Articles" group. After saving and configuring this menu item, your archived articles will be accesible to your visitors.

The archive listing is showing a series of dropdowns used to select dates. After selecing a date, you will see a listing of articles archived on that particular day/month/year.

The dropdowns show all dates, even if there are no archived entries for a particular date. This is bad for your visitors, since they have to "guess" dates(unless you archived articles each and every day).

Joomla provides a standard preinstalled archive module. This module is a bit better with archive display. the Archive module shows link to archived items grouped by month. It will show a link to a particular month ONLY if there are archived entries for that month. you can configure the maximum number of links that you want the module to display.

Meet TMJAA2 ! This Joomla plugin can take automatic actions on your articles. It can move them, trash them, delete them or archive them automatically based on "finish publishing" date and/or on how old they are.