Custom Post Type Archives by Date and Taxonomy in WordPress

Yes, there isn currently built-in support for CPT archives, but that doesn mean you can extend WP to provide it. I just did this myself the other day...

This won create the date-based archives you're looking for, but it will give you virtual archive behavior for custom post types. Adding the date should just be a matter of tweaking the rewrite rules (actually, date-based permalinks might just work as-is)...

EXAMPLE: you have a custom type of "movies" and single movie post called "gone with the wind". This code will give you a URL structure of website.com/movies/gone-with-the-wind. Also, going to website.com/movies will list just the movies (just like a category archive, though it willt call the archive.php template for output, but will format the output just like the standard index.php loop template).

function register_post_type_archives( $post_type, $base_path = '' ) { global $wp_rewrite; if ( !$base_path ) { $base_path = $post_type; } $rules = $wp_rewrite->
generate_rewrite_rules($base_path); $rules[$base_path.'/?$'] = 'index.php?paged=1'; foreach ( $rules as $regex=>
$redirect ) { if ( strpos($redirect, 'attachment=') == FALSE ) { $redirect .= '&post_type='.$post_type; if ( 0 < preg_match_all('@\$([0-9])@', $redirect, $matches) ) { for ( $i=0 ; $i < count($matches[0]) ; $i++ ) { $redirect = str_replace($matches[0][$i], '$matches['.$matches[1][$i].']', $redirect); } } } add_rewrite_rule($regex, $redirect, op'); }
}

call this function right after having generated your custom post type:

register_post_type('movies', $args);
register_post_type_archives('movies');

Then, if you would like to be able to use custom templates to control the output of these quasi-archive listings, you can use this:

add_action(emplate_redirect', 'post_type_templates');
function post_type_templates() { $post_type = get_query_var('post_type'); if (!empty($post_type)) { locate_template(array("{$post_type}.php","index.php"), true); die; }
}

Now you can create a "movies.php" template in your theme and customize the loop output to your liking..

UPDATE: having the archive functionality for custom types is great, but I realized I needed a way to access them. You can obviously hard-code buttons somewhere that point to the slugs, but I made a function to generate a wp3.0 navbar with all my custom types in it. Rightw it spawns a new navbar and makes it the primary, but you could change it to be the secondary, or to just add the items to an existing navbar. Note: the nav links will only work if you're using the rewrite rules from above.

function register_typenav() { $mainnav = wp_get_nav_menu_object('Types Nav'); if (!$mainnav) { $menu_id = wp_create_nav_menu( 'Types Nav' ); // vav item for each post type $types = get_post_types( array( 'exclude_from_search' =>
 false ), 'objects' ); foreach ($types as $type) { if (!$type->
_builtin) { wp_update_nav_menu_item( $menu_id, 0, array( 'menu-item-type' =>
 'custom', 'menu-item-title' =>
 $type->
labels->
name, 'menu-item-url' =>
 get_bloginfo('url') . '/' . $type->
rewrite['slug'] . '/', 'menu-item-status' =>
 'publish' ) ); } } if ($mainnav && !has_nav_menu( 'primary-menu' ) ) { $theme = get_current_theme(); $mods = get_option("mods_$theme"); $key = key($mods['nav_menu_locations']); $mods['nav_menu_locations'][$key] = $mainnav->
term_id; update_option("mods_$theme", $mods); }
}
add_action('init', 'register_typenav');