I have been using the Extended Live Archives plugin for my archives page up until my previous theme. The Extended Live Archives or ELA is one of the best archive plugins created for WordPress and unfortunately, it lost its popularity and functionality the moment WordPress 2.3 was released. Why? Because WP 2.3′s database structure was modified, and as most of us know it created issues and incompatibilities with a lot of WordPress plugins one of which was ELA.

Let’s take a quick review of the changes in the database schema. In WordPress 2.3, the tables wp_categories, wp_link2cat and wp_post2cat became obsolete and were replaced by the following: wp_terms, wp_term_relationships and wp_term_taxonomy. Thus causing the plugin incompatibilities.

It seemed like it was the end for ELA especially because the author didn’t update or had no plans of updating the plugin to work with WordPress 2.3. Fortunately, a blogger from Hong Kong named Tinyau took the time and effort to fix ELA so that it would work with WordPress 2.3.

To fix the problem, Tinyau modified the code of the ELA plugin to make it work with the new database schema. In the process, the following files have been modified:

• af-extended-live-archive.php
• af-extended-live-archive-include.php
• af-extended-live-archive-option.php
• includes/af-ela.php

So if you want to use or reinstall the Extended Live Archives plugin on your WP 2.3+ blog, you can do so by downloading the modified version of Extended Live Archives from Tinyau’s blog and replace the four specified files above, activate it and you’re good to go. A friendly reminder, make sure you create backups of your WP database and the files that needs to be overwritten just in case something goes wrong. Better safe than sorry!

Btw, you might be wondering why I no longer use ELA on my blog. The reason is, I already use a lot of plugins and IMO the ELA archives doesn’t match or work well with the new theme layout. Hehe

Anyone else ditched Extended Live Archives because of WP 2.3? If you’re not using it or haven’t used ELA before, what archive plugin are you using on your blog?

Hat tip to iLemoned and Tinyau.