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Extended Live Archives (ELA) plugin works, finally

It’s sad when a useful tool becomes rusty and is then abandoned. I liked how the Extended Live Archives plugin (ELA) for WordPress very neatly arranged my archives page. ELA stopped functioning with version 2.3 of the blog application. However, thanks to TinYau (天佑) and Jason Hansen, their efforts made ELA finally work with the latest releases of WordPress.

Here I describe the steps I took. I virtually had help walking up to and standing on the shoulders of others!

  1. Backup your current ELA plugin directory, i.e., [install_path]/wp-content/plugins/af-extended-live-archive/. You’ll need some files from here later.
  2. Download the patched version of ELA which fixes the database changes that took place back in WordPress v2.3 from here: http://blog.tinyau.net/download/6. Note that this patch contains only four changed files, not the entire plugin:

    af-extended-live-archive.php
    af-extended-live-archive-include.php
    af-extended-live-archive-option.php
    includes/af-ela.php

  3. Replace the above four files. But don’t clobber the other files. If you do so by accident, though, add back the unchanged files from your backup in Step 1.
  4. Download a newer version of the file af-extended-live-archive.php from here: http://www.theglitch.ws/ELA.zip. Unzip this package.
  5. Replace af-extended-live-archive.php with the newer version you grabbed in Step 4.
  6. Tweak the archives.php template file in your active theme(s) to include the ELA code. For example, I added the statement <?php if (function_exists('af_ela_super_archive')) {af_ela_super_archive();} ?> in its own div within The Loop.
  7. Tweak the includes/af-ela-style.css from the plugin, as well as style.css in your active theme(s), so that the layout of ELA suits your needs.
  8. Don’t forget to go to the ELA admin settings to display articles by tags. Scroll down to the Tab Order section, then select the appropriate options from the dropmenus. (That is, if you want to show a tag listing, of course.)
  9. Moreover, make sure there are values for Most Popular and Least Popular Font Size and Color — four fields in the bottom left of the admin settings, under What about the tags? Leaving out color values will make the tags invisible (or perhaps white by default). Speaking of color, use 6-digit hex values, rather than 3-digit ones, otherwise the resulting color will be wrong.
  10. Save the ELA admin settings by hitting Update Options Now. If the content in ELA look out of date, hit the Empty Cache Now button. You should now be up and running!

But will ELA work in the upcoming WordPress v2.7? We shall see.

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This was written by sairuh. Posted on Monday, November 3, 2008, at 1:32 pm. Filed under Software. Tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

4 comments

  1. Jason Hansen wrote:

    I’m running WordPress 2.7 beta 1 right now & ELA is still working without problems.

    Wednesday, 5 November 2008 at 8:57 am | Permalink
  2. sairuh wrote:

    Thanks for the update, Jason!

    Thursday, 6 November 2008 at 3:46 pm | Permalink
  3. Livia wrote:

    Thank you very much for the update and the detailed instructions - it works like a charm :-)

    Saturday, 22 November 2008 at 12:48 pm | Permalink
  4. Peperuka wrote:

    Busy upgrading my WP 2.3 and was looking for this for months.

    Thanks.

    PS. ELA is much better than Snazzy Archives

    Friday, 28 November 2008 at 6:43 am | Permalink

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