cosleia

Okay, my friend (are people who read each other’s blogs considered friends?) Derik DeLong helped me out with this problem, and I thought I’d share his solution with you.

Put this before the beginning of the loop:

<?php $firsttime = true; ?>

Put this at the beginning inside the loop:

<?php $newdate = the_date('',' BEFORE','AFTER', FALSE); ?>

<?php
if ($firsttime) :
$firsttime = false;
elseif ($newdate != "") :
?>
FOOTER CODE
<?php endif; ?>

<?php if ($newdate != "") : ?>
HEADER CODE
<?php echo $newdate; ?>
MORE HEADER CODE
<?php endif; ?>

Put this after the loop (after the endwhile):

FINAL FOOTER CODE

This has done the trick, and all I need to do now is tweak some CSS to get it all to look right. Thanks to Derik for his code-mastery!

Thank you very much for your advice concerning CSS. This article at alistapart.com seems to discuss exactly my issue.

I am still unclear on whether or not there is a way to have a “date footer” in WordPress, however. I don’t want there to be a box around every post, but around every date. Each date has multiple posts in it. In Blogger, this was easy, because there was a tag for it. Essentially, I am unclear on what I could mark in my index.php as the date footer, something that would only show up at the end of a group of posts that all occurred on the same day.

Thanks for any help.