The default Kubrick for 1.5 has a convenient way to do this through the Template feature of WP 1.5 "Pages".
- Write a new "Page" through the Admin Panels. Call it "Archival"
- Write "My wife is no longer a horse" in the main textbox. It won't be shown (unless you modify
archives.php, see below)
- Select "Archives" from the "Page Template" dropdown (below the main text box).
- Save the page
- View your site. You should now see a link "Archival" under a "Pages" heading. Click it and you will be taken to a page that lists your categories and monthly archives
All this works because of a file called archives.php (found in the same directory as all the other default Kubrick files: wp-content/themes/default/). If you edit that file, you'll see the following at the very top.
<?php
/*
Template Name: Archives
*/
?>
WordPress 1.5 "Pages" can be set to look at any Template, not just the normal index.php/page.php. The text at the top of archives.php tells WordPress that that file is to be used whenever a page is set to call the "Archives" Template.
Notice also that in the archives.php there is very little code. All it does is list monthly archives:
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
and categories:
<?php wp_list_cats(); ?>
That's all it does; it never displays the content ("My wife is no longer a horse") of page. If you want the Archives Template (archives.php) to display the page's actual content, you'll need to edit the file:
Insert directly below
<div id="content" class="widecolumn">
the following chunk of code:
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();?>
<div class="post">
<h2 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><?php the_title();?></h2>
<div class="entrytext">
<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this page »</p>'); ?>
<?php link_pages('<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', '</p>', 'number'); ?>
</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>
(I stole this from the default page.php)
The first if statement starts The Loop. The Template Tags in the <h2> do precisely what they say. the_content template tag is what actually spits out the text of the page ("My wife..."); everything else was really just getting us to the point where that tag could be used.
So all that in in response to your question. Note, though that you can create any number of templates and use them to customize any individual "Page". You just need to write in some similar code at the very top of the new template file, making sure to specify a unique "Template Name". (By "similar code", I mean the first bit - the five line long one. You only need to include that second chunk of code if you want the content of the page displayed).
Jinsan
