Organise lists of posts by month using Y/m/d - php

Question

I am making a blog, and I want to be able to filter results based upon the date the post was added. The posts have a datetime in the format 2013-11-15 04:08:03. Now I want to click on a list of months, so let's say I click November it should show all posts in November, but I'm not to sure how I will extract the month from the above time and then add that to a query.
What I've got go so far is a list of months. You select a month that pass's on the numeric value of the month, that is, January = 01. Now that all works, and I can echo out that it works on the net page, but how do I link that with Y/m/d so that the 01 selects all entries with the 01 month?
I was thinking it would be something like select all where m = the selected month (m being the m in Y/m/d).

Answer 1

To get all months, in which you have your posts, you can run this simple query:
SELECT
DATE_FORMAT(`date_field`, '%Y%m') AS `id`,
DATE_FORMAT(`date_field`, '%M %Y') AS `title`
FROM
`posts_table`
GROUP BY
DATE_FORMAT(`date_field`, '%Y%m')
ORDER BY
`date_field` DESC
When you fetch this year-months, create links with id fetched from previous query, like:
echo '' . $row['title'] . '';
# November 2013
And when user lands on this link, fetch GET parameter and select all posts for this month:
SELECT *
FROM `posts_table`
WHERE DATE_FORMAT(`date_field`, '%Y%m') = ?
Where ? should be selected month, like 201311. But if you have some index on date_field, then you should use BETWEEN so index will be applied:
$selected = '201311';
$from = new DateTime("{$selected}01");
$sql = "
SELECT *
FROM `posts_table`
WHERE `date_field` BETWEEN ? AND ?
";
// first ? should be $from->format('Y-m-d 00:00:00');
// second ? should be $from->format('Y-m-t 23:59:59');