Building a Year-and-Month News Archive with evoArchive

This article adapts a small but useful legacy community note into a clearer English guide.

If a news section keeps growing under one parent, the tree becomes harder to manage for editors. One practical solution is to group entries automatically by year and month, so new documents are stored in predictable archive containers instead of piling up in a single folder.

What evoArchive does

evoArchive is a lightweight helper that restructures a news tree by date. In practical terms it can:

• create year containers when a new year appears
• create month containers inside the correct year
• move or place newly created news documents into the correct archive branch
• keep the manager tree readable when a site publishes a lot of entries

It fills a similar editorial need to front-end archive tools such as DLReflect, but it does the structural work in the manager tree itself.

When this approach makes sense

• news-heavy sites with many posts every month
• editorial projects where the resource tree is part of the daily workflow
• projects that need a stable archive structure for browsing, exports, or internal maintenance

If the project publishes only a few posts per year, this may be unnecessary. But for active content operations it quickly pays off.

Repository

The original package referenced in the legacy note is available here:

github.com/liber87/evoArchive

Typical workflow

1. Create a root container for the news archive.
2. Configure the plugin to watch that branch.
3. Create a new news document under the root parent.
4. Let the plugin place it into the correct year and month folder.

The result is a manager tree that stays readable over time:

News
├── 2024
│   ├── 01
│   ├── 02
│   └── 03
├── 2025
│   ├── 01
│   └── 02
└── 2026
    └── 04

Why this is useful beyond navigation

Archive structure is not only about aesthetics. It also helps with:

• cleaner editor workflows
• faster manual maintenance in the manager
• clearer content ownership by period
• predictable archive pages and listings if the front end reflects the same structure

Things to verify before using it

• make sure the project really uses resource dates consistently
• decide whether the archive is driven by publish date, creation date, or another field
• test the behavior on a staging copy before reorganizing a large existing tree
• check any listing snippets or archive pages that assume a flat structure

Final note

For large editorial projects, archive automation is one of those small quality-of-life improvements that saves time every week. It will not matter on every site, but when the content tree becomes busy, a structured year-and-month archive is much easier to live with than one endless folder.