WordPress ListMaker

Note! WordPress ListMaker v2 has been released, available from here.

WordPress.org is a great blogging platform - good themes, nice features and good-looking skins. However, there is one feature that has been annoying the heck out of me - WordPress doesn't allow making index of all posts that you have. I have no idea why, especially since it is 30 minutes of coding in PHP...

WordPress.com has a FAQ entry about making an index, but, quite frankly, that is one stupid way to make index page. Of course, you can do the page manually, but that would require updating that page ever so often - and unless you started from the beginning, you have dozens or even hundreds of posts that need to be added - and that is definitely not fun...

You could do your own PHP index page creator - but, if you have blog in WordPress.com, like I do, you just cannot access the PHP code... and besides, I've never been all that good in PHP.

So I decided to make an external list maker. It is not fully automatic, but it is definitely better than nothing.

Using WordPress ListMaker

• Go to your WordPress Dashboard. Select tab Manage and from there Export. Click Download Export File. This will do a backup of your blog - offering to download a file named something like wordpress.2007-07-29.xml. Save that file and remember where you saved it.
• Download and start WordPress ListMaker. There is no installer, just the executable.
• Decide what way you want your list sorted - date, date reverse, first tag, title - and select the appropriate radio button.
• Click Open XML and select the XML file you just downloaded.
• Program will parse the file and create HTML list containing all your released pages and posts. You can see the list on the tab Preview - but note, that it is not using a theme, when you put it to your page, it will follow the theme of your blog.
• Tweak the HTML on Code tab if you want to. Switching from Code tab to Preview will update the preview.
• Click Copy code to clipboard
• Create a new post or page on your blog - or you can use an existing post/page.
• Go to tab Code on the Write Post page and paste the the contents of your clipboard there.
• Voilà! All done, go to Visual section to edit things further or just publish the page.

Acknowledgements

• LawdyMama. As always, my first tester, giving me good ideas and keeping my spirit up. Thank you!
• WordPress for making a great blogging platform

Changelog

• 1.0 (2007/07/29). Very first version.
• 1.01 (2007-08-04). Items will be reordered when you change the selection, not only during XML parsing. Scrollbars for HTML source view, fixed weird issue with   that caused .NET XML parser to choke, changed the icon.
• 1.02 (2007-08-09). Fixed XML parsing error with "blockquote cite=" - WordPress creates malformed XML in some cases. Made XML parsing error to include more information.