I’ve incorporated Dodo’s hack plus my hack of that hack into the 0.6pre3 version of b2archives.php. Note the sort by title/category does not use the proper date formatting stuff. I’ll get around to that shortly. You can get the file here

OK. Sorted out the new version. It’s now running live on this site. I had just one more problem (after I’d got the tar file extracted) which must be a PHP version difference between my local machine and my hosts server. A set of variables were out of scope causing a database access to fail on the stand alone archives page. Sorted now. I’ll look at the calendar next.

I managed to merge the new version with the various hacks and my own tweaks (good old CVS). It seems to work OK.
Unfortunately, for ease of use, I had ftp-ed my whole repository onto my local machine, did the merge there, committed my changes, tar-gzipped it back up with cygwin‘s tar and ftp-ed it back to my server. At which point it refused to untar as the UID and GID values are different from those on my server. As I don’t have root on my server :-), I don’t know what to do about it. I could ftp each file individually, but I really don’t want to do that if I can avoid it.

I’ve managed to address Sansom’s problem with the archives page, or at least I think I have. You can get the updated version. Sansom, let me know if this addresses the problem you found.

I noticed that a new version of B2 has been released. I’ve just downloaded it, I’ll try it on my local machine and attempt to merge it with the various hacks I’ve installed along with my own tweaks.
More when I’ve got it.

I got a comment from Sansom asking about my archives page.
Well it’s a hack of Dodo’s hack. You can get it b2archives.php here. If I remember correctly, I simply added the cat_name column to the query, then did a check for the column value changing in the output loop. The other thing I did was to plug Dodo’s changes back into the latest version of b2archives.php. Anyway check the code and you’ll see what I mean.

Cool. I’ve got B2 working locally on my Windows Machine. I’ve even d/loaded my database dump so I’ve got a reasonable number of posts to play with.
I’m gonna use this local copy to play about with templates, and potential add-ons.

I took a mock Java Programmers exam today and passed! Only by a few percent though. But not bad for a first attempt. At least I now know which areas I need to revise!