I think I got it now! Thank you for your patience. I had trouble separating what you have, what you want, and what you tried. The problem was not any awkward English, your English is fine.
To accomplish your desire to show either the current year or the year requested, you need to hook into the ‘pre_get_posts’ action to alter the query as needed. You action callback function should incorporate the following logic.
First, check if the query is for a news archive, if not, return without doing anything. Next check if a ‘year’ query var contained in the query object passed is set with $query->get('year'). An empty string is returned if it is not set.
If it is set, your action callback can return, the query should work properly without intervention, as it sounds like you have rewrite rules working correctly. The only thing you’re looking for is when the year does not exist, as this results a list of all news instead of the current year. To get the query to return the only current year, simply add the current year to the query vars with $query->set('year', date('Y'))
The one trick here I’m not quite sure about is how to return the previous year if the current year query returns no results. One option is to run a count query with the current query vars and decrement the year value if 0 is returned. Another is to set up your news archive template to query_posts() for the prior year when have_posts() at the beginning of the “loop” is false.
This should work properly if your category-news.php template is based on a normal archive template that runs the “loop”. The fact you are getting only years listed and no posts leads me to believe you need to change what it is based on, as wp_list_archives() (not a WP function?) is not meeting your needs.
Which leads us to where you now need a way to accomplish the “pagination” to access other years. I think you may need to build your own paging function to list only a few adjacent years, then earlier and later options beyond that. There’s two issues with doing this. One is determining terminal conditions. The current year is easy, the earliest year can be hard coded if this is for one blog, otherwise a count query needs to be run to check for earlier posts. The other issue, which may not even apply, is to check for intermediate years with no posts. Again, count queries can take care of this if need be.
You can look at other pagination functions for ideas on how to build in the required logic, it’s just that you’re using year numbers instead of page numbers and the count queries change accordingly.
I’m not sure how well this matches up with what you already have, but it is a viable approach requiring no queer hacks.
