Archiving is a new feature, introduced in version 1.11 of Article Manager. If you have an earlier version of Article Manager, you'll need to update the program to take advantage of this feature. You can find your version information on the bottom of the General page of the Setup Options.
By moving older articles into archives, it's possible to get Article Manager working much faster with large quantities of articles. Archived articles use considerably less disk space, and are skipped over when using the Article Editor or when using the program's search engine.
Archived articles may still be searched, but the search engine can only search one article set at a time. The articles' detail pages and printer pages are also still available, but are displayed via a dynamic viewer program called view.cgi.
For your website visitors to browse your archives, they'll need to use the search engine. We've added a new pulldown field to the advanced search page (/templates/search/advanced_search.html), allowing your visitors to select an article set, which is dynamically generated.
If you're upgrading Article Manager, you may find it easier to copy-and-paste the new field into your existing template, rather than redo your customization of the template, here is the HTML code to add to your /templates/search/advanced_search.html template file:
<tr>
<td class="text">Article Set </td>
<td>
<select name="archive">
<option value="">Current Articles</option>
$archive_pulldown$
</select>
</td>
</tr>
Article Manager's Setup Options now have a tab for managing these archives; you can move articles between the "Current Articles" set and any archived article sets you create. Articles are moved by date ranges: you can only move articles between article sets by specifying two dates. You can also specify that you'd only like to move articles from certain categories by selecting them from the listbox.
After articles have been archived, to prevent broken article links, Article Manager now has the capability of publishing "redirect" pages in the place of your archived articles' detail and printer pages. These pages will redirect visitors and search engines to the article via the dynamic article viewer. You can enable or disable the publishing of redirect pages on the Server tab of the Setup Options, under Publish Settings.
The dynamic article viewer can be accessed using a regular query string (view.cgi?archive=2&num=34) or by using "extra path info" (view.cgi/2/34). Please note that some web servers support extra path info (e.g. Apache) while others do not (e.g. Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)). Sometimes, some external search engines will not spider pages with obvious query strings, so path info can be used to fool them into spidering article pages. You can change how the program outputs "dynamic viewer URLs" on the Server tab of the Setup Options, under Publish Settings. Please note that you'll have to "Publish All" to have your "redirect" pages reflect the change.