Fuel Blog Module: How to change url to display month name rather than number

mark1979

Hi

Firstly just wanted to say how much I am enjoying working with fuelcms. It really is easy to work with.

While creating my own site, I wanted to implement a breadcrumb for the blog in order to aid user friendliness. Part of this required the need to display the month within the url as a short textual month rather than a numeric month.

E.g.
Numeric = /index.php/blog/2013/11/01
Textual = /index.php/blog/2013/Nov/01

I was unable to find a method via the forums, so I thought I would figure it out myself and share the methodology here.

File: /blog/models/blog_posts_model.php
change
$month = date('m', strtotime($this->date_added));
to
$month = date('M', strtotime($this->date_added));

File: /blog/libraries/fuel_blog.php
change
$key = date('Y/m', strtotime($post->date_added));
to
$key = date('Y/M', strtotime($post->date_added));

Alternatively, you could use F to display the full textual month e.g. November

Hope this helps someone else in the future.

Mark

admin

Nice... thanks for sharing. As an FYI, I just posted a fix earlier today to the blog module to fix the next_post and prev_post:
https://github.com/daylightstudio/FUEL-CMS-Blog-Module/commit/187e897d23c966d38d7fb4c6bd4531722088714e

mark1979

You're welcome. And thanks for the FYI. Btw, what was the problem with the next_post and prev_post? I hadn't spotted that one.

admin

The sort order should have been the following:
next_post: post_date asc, id asc
prev_post: post_date desc, id desc

It was missing the "asc" and "desc" after post_date.

mark1979

Hi Admin

I upgraded to V1 today, which went relatively smoothly. However when I updated /blog/libraries/fuel_blog.php with $key = date('Y/F', strtotime($post->date_added)); in order to change the archive url to use a full textual month, it causes the href label to display the previous month. Using 'm' or 'M' is works fine and the label remains the same as the month within the url, but not for 'F'.

Any ideas why?

Thanks

admin

So you are saying something like the following is happening (say the month is December)?
$key = date('Y/m', strtotime($post->date_added)); // 2013/12
$key = date('Y/M', strtotime($post->date_added)); // 2013/Dec
$key = date('Y/F', strtotime($post->date_added)); // 2013/November

mark1979

Sorry, should have gave an example.

$key = date('Y/m', strtotime($post->date_added));
url = /blog/2013/12 correct
placeholder = December 2013 (1) correct
$key = date('Y/M', strtotime($post->date_added));
url = /blog/2013/Dec correct
placeholder = December 2013 (1) correct
$key = date('Y/F', strtotime($post->date_added));
url = /blog/2013/December correct
placeholder = November 2013 (1) WRONG

When I say placeholder, I mean the hyperlink text inbetween the 'a' tags. Not too sure what it is meant to be called.

admin

It also seems to work if you do "y/F". You'll need to modify the code in the fuel/modules/blog/views/themes/{yourtheme}/_blocks/archives.php file where it calculates the $month_str value.

mark1979

Thanks for that. I managed to reformat the links to display correctly.

The next thing I have noticed, is that in order to filter the archive by month that I need to parse month number through the url
/index.php/blog/2013/12
By using
/index.php/blog/2013/december
it displays all posts regardless of month.

Any pointers on where I need to modify to allow full textual months to be recognised.

admin

You would need to look in the main blog controller at the very top of the _remap function where it says:
$year = ($this->uri->rsegment(2) != 'index') ? (int) $this->uri->rsegment(2) : NULL;
Note that it casts it to an int value. I'm guessing that's the problem.

mark1979

Thanks Admin, that was the problem. I found that if I changed
$month = (int) $this->uri->rsegment(3);
to this
$month = (int) date('m', strtotime($this->uri->rsegment(3)));
then I could use
/blog/2013/december
/blog/2013/dec