How to use date based views in Django - django

Question

It maybe a little naive question but I have been trying to understand how I can use the new Date Based views in django, but without an example, I am at a dead end. What I want to do is to show all my blog entries on a page (with pagination) and in the side navigation I want to show the archiving done according to year and month.
What I want is very basic and can be seen in the picture attached below.
If somebody can provide me an example then it would be really great. I can handle the templates, but just need to know how to use the class based generic views. I haven't really really used much if generic views.

Answer 1

The simplest example:
views.py
from django.views.generic.dates import MonthArchiveView
from myapp.models import Article
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^articles/monthly/$',MonthArchiveView.as_view(
model=Article,
paginate_by=12,
date_field='publish_date',
template_name='archive_templates/monthly.html',
),name="monthly"),
)
You need to call the view with a correct day and month, otherwise you'll get an exception. Default arguments are year in Y format, and month in b (lowercase short month name).
Example call articles/monthly/?year=2012&month=feb
Here is a sample archive_templates/monthly.html you can use.
I am using css classes from the excellent twitter bootstrap framework. Highly recommended!
This snippet goes through the available months:
Archive for {{ month|date:"F" }} {{ month.year }}<br />
<div class="pagination pull-left">
<ul>
{% if previous_month %}
<li class="prev">
<a href="{% url monthly %}?year={{ previous_month|date:"Y" }}&month={{ previous_month|date:"b" }}">
← {{ previous_month|date:"M Y" }}
</a>
</li>
{% endif %}
{% if next_month %}
<li class="next">
<a href="{% url monthly %}?year={{ next_month|date:"Y" }}&month={{ next_month|date:"b" }}">
{{ next_month|date:"M Y" }} →</a>
</li>
{% endif %}
</ul>
</div>
{% endif %}
This snippet does the pagination:
{% if is_paginated %}
<div class="pagination pull-right">
<ul>
<li class="{% if page_obj.has_previous %}prev {% else %} prev disabled {% endif %}">
←</li>
<li class="disabled"><strong>{{ page_obj.number }} of {{ paginator.num_pages }}</strong></li>
<li class="{% if page_obj.has_next %}next{% else %} next disabled {% endif %}">
→
</li>
</ul>
</div>
{% endif %}
The actual list of objects is very simple to iterate over:
<table class="zebra-striped" width="100%">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>#</th>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Author</th>
<th>Published On</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
{% for obj in object_list %}
<tr>
<th>{{ forloop.counter }}</th>
<td>{{ obj.title }}</td>
<td>{{ obj.author }}</td>
<td>{{ obj.publish_date|date:"d/m/Y" }}</td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
</tbody>
</table>
From here you should be able to figure out how to develop your archive menu.