How to make a normal standard blog-archive layout?

Mark: I believe the archive format/method should be swappable, and not the default.

One thing to point out though which might not be readily apparent is that if combined with a summary of the most recent 3 stories, people will expect it to go

Story from 1st August
Story from 20th July
Story from 15th July

Archive:
August
July
June..

that is to say, month-based links to archive pages include the 3 most recent stories. That’s not how the archive works now. This probably needs to be a toggle.

Do you invisage that an archive pageid would need to be specified?

this would be sooo great!
THANKS!

All blog software I’ve used in the past (WP, MT, Typepad, etc) all allow archiving by a date scheme defined by the user (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) and/or also by category. This is two different types of sorting. So a post’s title and excerpt will be listed, for instance, in August 2006 archive and also in Web News Category archive, and in newest first to oldest last order in both instances. I can’t remember the others, but Wordpress also has an admin mechanism to limit the number of title/excerpts on a page, thus creating a multi-page archive list in either instance instead of a 100+ title/excerpt monster.

What Kickass says sounds just great.