Date Pagination

A WordPress plugin to paginate your posts by year, month or day.

Download it here

This plugin provides an easy way to paginate posts by year, month or day in your theme’s template files. Use the native WordPress pagination functions to display the pagination links.

It’s likely your theme is already using these functions for normal pagination. If not, see if it works with your theme’s pagination or add them yourself.

To tell WordPress a page should be paginated by dates set the date_pagination_type query argument to 'yearly', 'monthly' or 'daily' in the pre_get_posts action. (See the examples below)

After that the posts will be paginated by date!

Note This plugin intentionally doesn’t do pagination for date archives. See this plugin to do just that.

Note: It’s recommended you create a child theme whenever you edit your theme template files.

Using dates in the pagination links

The WordPress pagination functions have labels similar as “Previous Page” and “Next Page” for the pagination links. If you would like to display dates instead use the label functions provided by this plugin.

To have the WordPress numerical pagination functions display dates instead of page numbers use the numerical pagination functions provided by this plugin instead.

Examples

These examples show you how to add Date Pagination to pages by seting the date_pagination_type query var.

Date pagination with pre_get_posts

You can set the type of date pagination to 'yearly', 'monthly' or 'daily' with the 'date_pagination_type' query variable.

Conditional tags let you choose where you want to use date pagination.

In this example we set the pagination to monthly on the home page. Use this example in your (child) theme’s functions.php file.

add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'monthly_paginated_home_query' );
function monthly_paginated_home_query( $query ) {

	// not a wp-admin page and the query is for the main query
	if ( !is_admin() && $query->is_main_query() ) {

		//  on the home page only
		if ( is_home() ) {

			// set the date pagination to 'monthly'
			$query->set('date_pagination_type', 'monthly'); 

			// set other arguments here
		}
	}
}

See this example loop for how you would use the WordPress pagination functions in your theme.

Getting date paginated posts with WP_Query

You can set the type of date pagination to 'yearly', 'monthly' or 'daily' with the 'date_pagination_type' argument.

In this example we set it to 'monthly'.

Note: Be aware that a custom query doesn’t update the main query and pagination. It’s only useful to get paginated posts. Use pre_get_posts instead.

<?php
// Example arguments.
$args = array(
	// set the date pagination to monthly
	'date_pagination_type' => 'monthly', // 'yearly', 'monthly', 'daily'
	'posts_per_page'       => 10,
	'paged'                => 2, // get posts for the second page
);

// The custom query.
$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
?>
<!-- The Loop -->
<?php while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post(); ?>
<!-- Your theme's loop code here -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

For a more comprehensive example of a custom query and the loop using the WordPress pagination functions see this example.

Troubleshooting Steps

The same troubleshooting steps for WordPress pagination functions apply to this plugin.

Troubleshooting steps if you queried the loop with new WP_Query.
Did you set the paged parameter?
Is pagination broken on a static front page?
Did you reset the loops if there are multiple loops?
Did you add the $max_pages to the next_posts_link() function?
Did you add the total to the paginate_links() function?