PHP MYSQL Blog Archive Menu by Year and Month

Question

I\'m looking for an efficient way to collate all blog posts into a menu of the following format:

2012

• August(6)
• September(4)

Answer 1

From your question, I understand you're trying to come up with a query to group a number of elements by month and year. The following should do the trick:

SELECT 
    YEAR(dateField) AS YEAR, 
    MONTH(dateField) AS MONTH,
    COUNT(*) AS TOTAL 
FROM table 
GROUP BY YEAR, MONTH

Obviously, "dateField" being the name of your datetime/timestamp column and "table" being the name of your table.

More information on the GROUP BY clause and aggregate functions (such as the COUNT(*) function used above) here.