Showing and navigating posts by date/week… can it be done?

Are “Major News” ,”Update Author Post” and “Minor News” categories?

oh, no, thats just what I was calling the posts. “Major news” would be the first post every week, itd be the main one that I would write, and it would be there every week.
The other two are things that wont necessarily be there every week, such as if someone else wanted to post up a piece of news, or if I posted up a small update.

If using some sort of categories would make things easier, and could be implemented easily enough for others to use too, then I’m happy to use them.
I did wonder if making each “week” of posts a category would help… so if another author wanted to post up some news, theyd just have to make sure it was connected to the right category… I’m not sure if this is easy though, or if it would even work the way im thinking…

There are no WordPress pagination functions that do that, so we have to create our own. Try it with this in your theme’s functions.php: https://pastebin.com/gM5hBfKd

Show the pagination functions in your index.php like this:

<?php
previous_week_link();
next_week_link();
?>

Or if you want to change the default labels “Previous Week”, “Next Week”:

<?php
previous_week_link('See previous week posts');
next_week_link('See next week posts');
?>

btw:
consider creating a child theme instead of editing your theme directly – if you upgrade the theme all your modifications will be lost.

ahh thank you, I will definately look into this, it seems promising! I plan on using a child theme file for all the customisations I do, for the very reason that I want to keep them all safe!

Just reading through that file now, trying to get my head around it. ill let you know if t worrks, I’m sure others will find it useful too!

thank-you again

OK… I believe I did this correctly, but it does not seem to have worked (at least as far as I can see).

I made a funtions.php in my child theme folder, and pasted that entire page from pastebin into it.
I then pasted the index.php from the main theme into my child theme, and added those echo lines into it.

but when I load up the front page, it just shows the most recent posts, with no pagination links.

I’m guessing ive posted the lines in incorrectly, but im not sure where else they should go

Oh… I do apologise, it turns out it does show up properly, the only reason it *wasnt* was because I didnt have any previous weeks for it to navigate to.

As soon as I backdated a post to a month ago, a “previous” link appeared on the front page!

So thankyou, it seems to be working as it should.

Now I am going to need to find a way to have the “next” and “previous” links permenantly on the page, just greyed out if they dont link to anything.

If you change this:

function next_week_link( $label = 'Next Week' ) {
	echo get_week_link( $label, 'next' );
}

function previous_week_link( $label = 'Previous Week' ) {
	echo get_week_link( $label, 'previous' );
}

To this:

function next_week_link( $label = 'Next Week', $display = true ) {
	if ( $display )
		echo get_week_link( $label, 'next' );
	else
		return get_week_link( $label, 'next' );
}

function previous_week_link( $label = 'Previous Week', $display = true ) {
	if ( $display )
		echo get_week_link( $label, 'previous' );
	else
		return get_week_link( $label, 'previous' );
}

You can test if a link is returned. And if no link is returned echo the label:

<?php
$prev =  previous_week_link( 'Previous Week', false );
$next =  next_week_link( 'Next Week', false );

echo ( $prev != '' ) ? $prev : 'Previous Week'; // echo label if nothing is returned
echo ( $next != '' ) ? $next : 'Next Week';
?>

After a bit of a false start with this (for some reason, the first time i copied the code, a load of & symbols got included) I manage to get it all inserted properly, and it seems to be working wonderfully!

Thankyou very much, all your help is really appreciated!

You’re welcome. I’m glad you got it resolved ??

I’m not sure if you are still keeping track of this thread, but an unfortunate flaw has come up with this solution.

I have been trying to exclude certain categories from my home page loop, as I dont want every type of new post appearing on my home page. In order to do this, I installed the this plugin.

However, even if I only exclude one category from the home feed, the posts from previous weeks which are fine… do not appear. In fact, the message “Ready to publish your first post? Start Here” appears instead.

I would say this might be a plugin issue, but the plugin doesnt seem to have issues like that. Besides, I did recently have to attempt to work around another problem which I think this navigation caused.

This second problem was, that I wanted to change the order of posts on the homepage from descending to ascending (or ascending to descending… whichever is the opposite of default). However, whichever method I used to change the order, worked on the current weeks posts fine…. but when I clicked on the “previous week” button, the previous week would appear blank. No posts from that week would show.

Im not sure where the conflict is appearing, I am hoping someone will be able to help me with a fix as I do really prefer the weekly navigation over the wordpress system.

Thankyou.

Bumps & duplicate threads will be deleted.

Try it with this in your theme’s functions.php: https://pastebin.com/P469Sid2
And change the category ids you want to exclude in your home page (and home page rss):

$my_exclude_categories = array( 1, 3 );
$my_exclude_categories_rss = array( 1, 3 );

Well once again you have come up with the fix I needed, thankyou so much!

I assume I was meant to delete the original changes to my funtions.php and replace them with the one you just posted? Thats what I did and it seems to be working anyway.

Will this new version also allow me to change the posting order on the front page? I would prefer them to be listed oldest -> newest for each week… though if this is a chore, I can simply change the publishing dates retroactivly so that it shows up in the order I want.

Thankyou again anyway, at least I’m now able to exclude certain categories!

Try changing this:

if ( is_home() ) {
                        $query->set( 'nopaging', true );
                        $query->set( 'category__not_in', $my_exclude_categories );
                        add_filter( 'posts_where', 'new_posts_where' );
                }

To this:

if ( is_home() ) {
                        $query->set( 'nopaging', true );
                        $query->set( 'category__not_in', $my_exclude_categories );
                        $query->set( 'order ', 'ASC' );
                        add_filter( 'posts_where', 'new_posts_where' );
                }

didnt seem to make any difference… I tried changing ASC to DESC but btoh ways just formats the homepage to the default order of newest first.