Correct way of ordering entries by a single month view

Question

I have a calendar. Currently viewable by year.

I need to add in a drop down/list of some sort which will show

January 2015
February 2015
...

When the user selects from the list I need to show only entires from that particular month. What is the correct way of achieving this?

I have the following in mind.

I pass variables to the URL either POST or GET so the url looks like

domain.com/calendar/january/2016
or
domain.com/calendar?month=january&year=2016

Then return the variables, using start_on & stop_before work some magic.

Similar as to above, I could pass some variables into a session & again use the content of the variables to affect my exp loop.

How would you perform this, is my logic sound or is there a simpler way?

Answer 1

Strangely I can't find this in the documentation, but you can filter entries dynamically by month by simply appending the year and month to the URL.

So given a standard channel:entries tag like this:

{exp:channel:entries channel="events"}

... /calendar/2015/01 will only show entries with an entry_date from January 2015.

On the resulting page, you can use the Date Heading tag pair to dynamically display the month:

{date_heading display="monthly"}
    <h1>{entry_date format="%F %Y"}</h1>
{/date_heading}

To generate your list of months to filter by, look a the Archive Month Links tag.