Month-by-month archive page layout?

Check out the query_posts function; one way to do what you want is to call it multiple times, specifying different months by passing them as parameters.

Right, you would loop through all your months and call that function for each month, then you could do this:

I’m not certain how to put the while (have posts()) statement for entries inside a similar while have-months sort of loop.

My apologies. I was assuming too much familiarity with WordPress.

WordPress has a database object called $wpdb that makes database queries really easy. Declare $wpdb as global somewhere in your archive file, like so:

global $wpdb;

Then you can get an array of archive month objects like so:

$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT YEAR(post_date) AS year, MONTH(post_date) AS month, count(ID) as posts
FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_date !=
'0000-00-00 00:00:00' AND post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY YEAR(post_date), MONTH(post_date) ORDER BY post_date DESC");

So that if you loop through the $results array:

foreach ( (array) $results as $month ) {

you can get each month, starting with the most recent month, that has posts in it, like so:

$month->year will return the year number (e.g. 2006)
$month->month will return the month number (e.g. 9)
$month->posts will return the number of posts in that month

So to do what you describe, within the foreach loop above, call the query_posts function, perhaps similar to the following:

query_posts("year=$month->year&monthnum=$month->month")

Then after that you can have the normal posts loop, and use the normal loop functions.

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

etc.