PHP MYSQL Blog Archive Menu by Year and Month

Question

I'm looking for an efficient way to collate all blog posts into a menu of the following format:

2012

• August(6)
• September(4)
• October(2)

Month representing the month(obviously), and the value inside the brackets representing the number of posts in that month. Once clicked, a search will then be made for all posts in that month, in that year.

I need it to be dynamic, picking up November automatically when a post is created in that month, and carrying on into December, into 2013 etc etc...

All I have is a UNIX timestamp for each post. I would really like to avoid using seperate functions to gather endless comlex arrays etc.

Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

From your question, I understand you're trying to come up with a query to group a number of elements by month and year. The following should do the trick:

SELECT 
    YEAR(dateField) AS YEAR, 
    MONTH(dateField) AS MONTH,
    COUNT(*) AS TOTAL 
FROM table 
GROUP BY YEAR, MONTH

Obviously, "dateField" being the name of your datetime/timestamp column and "table" being the name of your table.

More information on the GROUP BY clause and aggregate functions (such as the COUNT(*) function used above) here.