Using a custom field with the month_links tag

Question

Does anybody have a way of using the channel:month_links tag (to create a list of links to monthly archive pages) that takes it's date point from a custom date field rather than the entry_date field? I have a channel where the user can enter details of journalistic articles that they have written; one of the channel fields is {publication_date}. I want my month_links to be in the vein of:

Articles published in...

• June 2013
• July 2013
• August 2013
• etc

so I need the tag to hook into the publication_date not the entry_date. So far I can't find a way.

I realise that I could insist that users use the entry date field as the publication date, but the downside of that is that I can't change the field name (and 'entry date' is not a good label for the field, it's misleading), nor can I add field instructions.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you can overcome your objections to using the native Entry Date I'd definitely opt for using that... However, if you want to essentially rebuild the month_links functionality yourself, you could do this with Stash (yet again!).

Try something like this, using two nested get_list tags: (if you're using an embedded view template you won't need the stash:parse tags, but they're handy here when setting and getting in the same template...)

{exp:channel:entries channel="articles" dynamic="no"}

    {exp:stash:append_list name="months-to-output" trim="yes"}
        {stash:month-num}{publication_date format='%m'}{/stash:month-num}
        {stash:month-title}{publication_date format='%F %Y'}{/stash:month-title}
    {/exp:stash:append_list}

    {exp:stash:append_list name="articles-by-month" context="{custom_date format='%m'}"}
        {stash:the-title}{title}{/stash:the-title}
        {stash:the-link}{url_title_path=articles}{/stash:the-link}
    {/exp:stash:append_list}

{/exp:channel:entries}

{!-- ==============================
TEST OUTPUT 
=================================== --} 

{exp:stash:parse process="end"}
    <ul>
    {exp:stash:get_list name="months-to-output"}
        <li>
            <h2>{month-title}</h2>
            <ul>
            {exp:stash:get_list:2 name="articles-by-month" context="{month-num}"}
                <li><a href="{the-link}">{the-title}</a></li>
            {/exp:stash:get_list:2}
            </ul>
        </li>
    {/exp:stash:get_list}
    </ul>
{/exp:stash:parse}