As I said a few days ago, I had planned to use the Month at a Glance calendar for my monthly archives.

But this proved much more difficult that expected. It should have been simple. Mark had already provided all the templates, the stylesheet, the images etc. But I couldn’t work out how to actually make MT know how to use different templates for the monthly archives that the daily ones. The templates menu only provides a single template for a “Date-Based Archive”.

I couldn’t find anything obvious in the documentation, so I asked Mark, and he pointed me to the Archiving section of the Configuration. Here you can choose which sort of template you use for each type of archive (Daily, Monthly, Weekly etc.) But, again I couldn’t easily see how to change the template file. Confusingly there is an input box for “Archive File Template” but that isn’t actually the template for the archive, but a way to specify what the filename for each of your archives should be (so that you can have 2003/01/01.html instead of 2003_01_01.html, for example).

I tried “Add new” from this menu, but again it only let me create yet another view of the month using the standard “Date-Based Archive”.

I eventually discovered that I had to go back to the Templates menu and add an entirely new type of Archive Template, which I called “Month at a Glance”. Then when I went back to the Archiving menu and tried “Add new” again, this time my new template was one of the choices.

Unfortunately it still didn’t work from there, as rebuilding the site had no effect. Because I now had 3 different monthly archives set up, MT didn’t seem to want to use my new one (even though it was the only one selected as being active). I had to delete the other monthly archives, and then everything seemed to work.

So I now have a nifty ‘browse’ link under my calendar that lets you step around month by month.