Custom Post Type Archives by Date and Taxonomy

Yes, there isn’t currently built-in support for CPT archives, but that doesn’t mean you can’t extend WP to provide it. I just did this myself the other day…

This won’t create the date-based archives you’re looking for, but it will give you virtual archive behavior for custom post types. Adding the date should just be a matter of tweaking the rewrite rules (actually, date-based permalinks might just work as-is)…

EXAMPLE: you have a custom type of “movies” and single movie post called “gone with the wind”. This code will give you a URL structure of website.com/movies/gone-with-the-wind. Also, going to website.com/movies will list just the movies (just like a category archive, though it will not call the archive.php template for output, but will format the output just like the standard index.php loop template).

function register_post_type_archives( $post_type, $base_path="" ) {
    global $wp_rewrite;
    if ( !$base_path ) {
        $base_path = $post_type;
    }
    $rules = $wp_rewrite->generate_rewrite_rules($base_path);
    $rules[$base_path.'/?$'] = 'index.php?paged=1';
    foreach ( $rules as $regex=>$redirect ) {
        if ( strpos($redirect, 'attachment=") == FALSE ) {
            $redirect .= "&post_type=".$post_type;
            if (  0 < preg_match_all("@\$([0-9])@', $redirect, $matches) ) {
                for ( $i=0 ; $i < count($matches[0]) ; $i++ ) {
                    $redirect = str_replace($matches[0][$i], '$matches['.$matches[1][$i].']', $redirect);
                }
            }
        }
        add_rewrite_rule($regex, $redirect, 'top');
    }
}

call this function right after having generated your custom post type:

register_post_type('movies', $args);
register_post_type_archives('movies');

Then, if you would like to be able to use custom templates to control the output of these quasi-archive listings, you can use this:

add_action('template_redirect', 'post_type_templates');
function post_type_templates() {
    $post_type = get_query_var('post_type');
    if (!empty($post_type)) {
        locate_template(array("{$post_type}.php","index.php"), true);
        die;
    }
}

Now you can create a “movies.php” template in your theme and customize the loop output to your liking..

UPDATE: having the archive functionality for custom types is great, but I realized I needed a way to access them. You can obviously hard-code buttons somewhere that point to the slugs, but I made a function to generate a wp3.0 navbar with all my custom types in it. Right now it spawns a new navbar and makes it the primary, but you could change it to be the secondary, or to just add the items to an existing navbar. Note: the nav links will only work if you’re using the rewrite rules from above.

function register_typenav() {
    $mainnav = wp_get_nav_menu_object('Types Nav');
    if (!$mainnav) {
        $menu_id = wp_create_nav_menu( 'Types Nav' );
        // vav item for each post type
        $types = get_post_types( array( 'exclude_from_search' => false ), 'objects' );
        foreach ($types as $type) {
            if (!$type->_builtin) {
                wp_update_nav_menu_item( $menu_id, 0, array(
                    'menu-item-type' => 'custom',
                    'menu-item-title' => $type->labels->name,
                    'menu-item-url' => get_bloginfo('url') . "https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/" . $type->rewrite['slug'] . "https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/",
                    'menu-item-status' => 'publish'
                    )
                );
            }
        }
    if ($mainnav && !has_nav_menu( 'primary-menu' ) ) {
        $theme = get_current_theme();
        $mods = get_option("mods_$theme");
        $key = key($mods['nav_menu_locations']);
        $mods['nav_menu_locations'][$key] = $mainnav->term_id;
        update_option("mods_$theme", $mods);
    }
}
add_action('init', 'register_typenav');