Question

There is a simple table of news articles: [ id | title | body | created ].

What is the best way to create a simple news archive using smarty from a full collection of articles ordered by created date?

In the format:

• 2009
  • 12.11. Title
  • 03.03. Title
  • 01.01. Title
• 2008
  • 11.12. Title
  • 04.03. Title
  • 02.03. Title
  • 16.02. Title
• 2007
  • …
  • …

---

<ul>
    {foreach item=p from=$news}
    <li>{$p->created} {$p->title}</li>
    {/foreach}
</ul>

Answer 1

There are 2 ways

1. You create the structure in Smarty
2. You group results from db by year

The first would go

$rows = $db->query('select year, title from news');
$smarty->assign('news', $rows);

// smarty code
{if count($rows) > 0}
  {assign var=lastYear value=0}
  <ul><li>
  {foreach name=foo from=$rows item=item}
    {if $smarty.foreach.foo.first}
      {$row.year}<ul>
    {elseif $lastYear != $row.year}
      </ul></li><li>{$row.year}<ul>
    {/if}
    {assign var=lastYear value=$row.year}
    <li>{$row.title}</li>
  {/foreach}
  </ul></li></ul>
{/if}

The other one is to group the values in php:

$rows = $db->query('select year, title from news');
$news = array();
foreach($rows as $row) {
  $news[$row['year']][] = $row['title'];
}

$smarty->assign('news', $news);

// smarty code
<ul>
{foreach from=news key=year item=rows}
  <li>{$year}<ul>
  {foreach from=$rows item=row}
    <li>{$row}</li>
  {/foreach}
  </ul></li>
{/foreach}
</ul>

The choice is up to you