Group views with header by date
Last modified: March 30, 2008 - 14:26
I've come up with a cool variation on this snippet that allows you to group nodes by a date field. I've used it to create a news clipping archive that's sorted and grouped by the year that the clips were published.
To do this, I created a CCK node type called "News Clipping" and created a "Print Date" using CCK's associated date module. So, every clipping node has a custom date field that's available to the views module. In my custom view, I've given the print_date field the label "Date" - you'll need to change that to whatever you want in the view.
Here's the code:
<?php
function phptemplate_views_view_list_palm_in_print_by_year($view, $nodes, $type) {
$fields = _views_get_fields();
$taken = array();
// Set up the fields in nicely named chunks.
foreach ($view->field as $id => $field) {
$field_name = $field['field'];
if (isset($taken[$field_name])) {
$field_name = $field['queryname'];
}
$taken[$field_name] = true;
$field_names[$id] = $field_name;
}
// Set up some variables that won't change.
$base_vars = array(
'view' => $view,
'view_type' => $type,
);
foreach ($nodes as $i => $node) {
$vars = $base_vars;
$vars['node'] = $node;
$vars['count'] = $i;
$vars['stripe'] = $i % 2 ? 'even' : 'odd';
foreach ($view->field as $id => $field) {
$name = $field_names[$id];
$vars[$name] = views_theme_field('views_handle_field', $field['queryname'], $fields, $field, $node, $view);
if (isset($field['label'])) {
if ($field['label'] == 'Date') {
if ($header != date("Y", strtotime($vars[$name]))) {
$new_header = date("Y", strtotime($vars[$name]));
}
}
else {
$vars[$name . '_label'] = $field['label'];
}
}
if ($new_header) {
if ($items) {
$main_items[] = theme('item_list', $items, $header);
}
// reset values for the next one.
$items = array();
$header = $new_header;
$new_header = '';
}
}
$items[] = _phptemplate_callback('views-list-palm_in_print_by_year', $vars);
}
if ($items) {
$main_items[] = theme('item_list', $items, $header);
}
if ($items) {
return theme('item_list', $main_items);
}
}
?>**Note the use of strtotime and date functions to create the correct header.