Summary

The Collapsing Archives plugin creates a wigdet that makes the archives easily accessible from the sidebar.

Use

To use this widget, it simply needs to be added from the widgets page. The widget has a whole host of options that modify what and how the widget will display.

Upgrade

As of Wordpress 2.8.3 and theme "IT-Tuesday", this plugin displays properly without customization. Disregard instructions below unless display problems reappear.

In order to upgrade this plugin, one of the files must be edited in order to get the widget to display correctly in this theme. By default, the theme puts thin gray boxes around all widgets. However, it doesn't know the difference between a <ul> tag and its <ul> children. So nested lists end up displaying overlapping wire boxes around each <ul>. This is a problem with the Collapsing Archives widget. So, to fix it the collapsArchList.php file must be edited. Within it there are three edits that must be made, all of which simply add a style="border:0" to a particular elements. So, to get it to display like this...

Instead of like this...

After downloading the updated plugin, open the collapsArchList.php file. Within it, a border:0 style needs to be added to three elements.

1. The opening <ul> tag
2. The $postStyle variable
3. The $monthStyle <ul> tag

Unfortunately, as the code is reworked for upgrades, the line numbers do not stay the same. This means that it may be a challenge to find those three elements as the code changes. In most cases, however, it shouldn't be extremely difficult. When adding the style, pay careful attention to the quotation marks used. If single quotes are used where double quotes are required, it will break the .php file and not integrate right with the site.

The opening <ul> tag...

The $postStyle variable...

The $monthStyle <ul> tag...

As with all plugins, once those changes are made, deactivate the old plugin on the test site, replace the directory, and reactivate. Test the widget on the test site to make sure it looks and functions as it is supposed to. Then, update on the main site.