Custom archive pages for back issues?

[dugoni 0]

Hi, We've been working on an online version of our alumni magazine. We want to have a back issues archive page to list all issues, and also to customize the way individual issues are displayed. We've been using categories for the issues - Everything that's in a given issue is tagged "Issues" and then given a subcategory too - for example, "Fall 2011" Here's the main back issue archive: http://www.contactpoint.womeninit.net/backissue/ And here's a sample individual back issue archive page: http://www.contactpoint.womeninit.net/category/issues/fall-2011/ As you can see, I've actually been able to create something of an archive page, but it's only semi-automated - I manually put in the issue date and the cover image, and then use a shortcode that came with a plugin to list the articles in that issue. The plugin works by feeding it a category ID in the shortcode. I'm sure there's a better (and automated) way to do this. But how? Thank you!

[kastelic 6]

So each Issue is a post and then has multiple posts that are in a subcategory for that issue right? In that case can't you name the post for that issue "Fall 2001" and that will become its title? Additionally, when you make the post for that issue, you can set the Featured Image, which appears automatically depending on the format you've chosen. If you're doing this in the code you will want to use the template tags within the loop: the_title() the_permalink() the_post_thumbnail() Check here for more information on template tags:http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags These are how wordpress automates the appearence of posts or post excerpts. Well, really everything in wordpress ;)

[dugoni 0]

Thank you, but that's not quite how things are set up. Each article in the magazine issue is a post. The issue itself is not a post. Each article is tagged "Issues" and "Fall 2011" (Or "Spring 2011"... you get the idea.) The reason I did it this way is so we'd have a hierarchy. We also may have occasional content that isn't from one of the published issues. So such a post might be tagged "Newsflash" or "Update" or whatever, but it will be outside the Issues "tree". So in theory, we could have an archive page that only covers subcategories of "Issues". I hope this makes things clearer. I think I've seen a plugin that lets you associate an image with a given category, so I suppose I could do that... anyway, based on this revised description, any suggestions?

[catrina 103]

So the occasional content that isn't from one of the published issues will be content you want excluded from the published issues hierarchy? That is the understanding I have. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[dugoni 0]

Catrina, you are correct. So really, I don't want to replace the normal archives format entirely (I'll want news items that didn't appear in the magazine to be available on our site too!) but I do want an additional archive format that supports what I'm trying to do.

[dugoni 0]

So does anybody have some advice on how to add a custom archive format so I can list back issues? In particular, I need to know how to do it within the Pagelines child theme.