Post count per (day/month/year) since blog began

So basically what you need to do is paste the following code in your theme’s sidebar.php file or any other file where you want to display custom WordPress archives.

<?php
global $wpdb;
$limit = 0;
$year_prev = null;
$months = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT MONTH( post_date ) AS month,YEAR( post_date ) AS year, COUNT( id ) as post_count FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status="publish" and post_date <= now( ) and post_type="post" GROUP BY month , year ORDER BY post_date DESC");
foreach($months as $month) :
$year_current = $month->year;
if ($year_current != $year_prev){
if ($year_prev != null){
?>
<?php } ?>

<li class="archive-year"><a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/60859/<?php bloginfo("url') ?>/<?php echo $month->year; ?>/"><?php echo $month->year; ?></a></li>


<?php } ?>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/60859/<?php bloginfo("url') ?>/<?php echo $month->year; ?>/<?php echo date("m", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month->month, 1, $month->year)) ?>"><span class="archive-month"><?php echo date("F", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month->month, 1, $month->year)) ?></span></a></li>
<?php $year_prev = $year_current;

if(++$limit >= 18) { break; }

endforeach; ?>

Note: If you want to change the number of months displayed, then you need to change line 19 where the current $limit value is set to 18.

Our CSS looked a bit like this:

.widget-archive{padding: 0 0 40px 0; float: left; width: 235px;}
.widget-archive ul {margin: 0;}
.widget-archive li {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
.widget-archive li a{ border-left: 1px solid #d6d7d7; padding: 5px 0 3px 10px; margin: 0 0 0 55px; display: block;}
li.archive-year{float: left; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, san-serif; padding: 5px 0 3px 10px; color:#ed1a1c;}
li.archive-year a{color:#ed1a1c; margin: 0; border: 0px; padding: 0;}

Now if you want to show the count of posts in each month, then you would need to add this bit of code anywhere in between line 12 – 16 of the above code:

<?php echo $month->post_count; ?>