The HEATWAVE is scorching this week! Wednesday we brought out the new WYSIWYG editor and today, we're rolling out true blog archiving on our Water, Sky and LightCMS systems. Archiving is something that many of you have asked about and it's something we've been looking forward to ourselves (to use on our own blog). Keep in mind that this release of archiving is only the beginning of the blog improvements we have planned for the coming months.

How does it work?

To display a blog element in "archive" view, simply change its skin. First, select "settings" from the blog element's control bar, then set the skin drop down to "archive" (see the image below). That's all there is to it. Simple, huh?

A blog element using the archive skin will display a list of months for any month that contains posts. Clicking one of the dates will expand out a listing of that month's posts. Each post's title can be clicked to view the full article.

Displaying posts from other blogs

When you make an archive, you are usually archiving posts that already exist in a blog element somewhere on your site. So, you'll need to make use of the "Display posts from other blogs" feature that is built in to every blog element. Just create an element that will serve as your archive, go to the settings, and look toward the bottom of the screen (see image below). You'll see a list of every other blog element on your website and you can choose the ones you want to include in your archive.

Example usage

For some examples of how you can use the new archive feature, you can take a look at our own company website.

1. The complete archive page. We've set up a separate page to house the archives of our entire blog. This allows us to display the archive in the main content region and include all posts all the way back to the beginning of our blog. Use this link to view our complete archives.
2. The sidebar archive. We've also added a smaller archive to the right-hand sidebar on our main blog page. For this archive, we've limited the output to the past 365 days worth of posts (you can control the time frame on the settings page as well). Use this link to see the sidebar archive on our main blog page.

Styling the archives

The markup is the same as any other blog list on our system, with the addition of a class called "archive" added to the surrounding div. Because of this, basic blog styles from our system, or custom styles you have applied to blog elements, should apply to your blog archives as well. If you wish to further tweak your archive styles, minor CSS tweaks can get you where you need to go.

Enjoy!

We hope you enjoy the new blog archiving feature. If you have questions, please feel free to leave us a comment, contact support, or post to our LightCMS user forum. Plus, be sure to stay tuned to our blog and our twitter feed for more hot new updates all summer long!