Can a scrollable date picker be done in Wordpress for archives?

Question

I've been asked by a client to do this:

But I have no idea how I would go about it, particularly in Wordpress. I searched around Google a bit, but it looks like this design was just lifted from an iPhone or is a Flash animation (I'm lame at Flash, so want to keep things all-based in HTML, CSS and JS - preferably jQuery).

Has anyone done this sort of thing? I'm assuming it would be quite complicated as the date picker needs to be populated dynamically as more and more posts are archived and to load the different queries created by selecting a month and year (to show the list of article titles to the right of it) would require some Ajax right?

Thanks for any pointers, especially if you can show me where a tutorial exists for this!

Osu

Answer 1

I'm going to leave the JavaScript/jQuery of the scroller up to you. But basically, run a loop of dates in that scroller. Then, when clicked, pass that date via AJAX to the server. Then use that date to query_posts, which you then return and insert into your dom.

Use http://www.garyc40.com/2010/03/5-tips-for-using-ajax-in-wordpress/ for the AJAX functionality. I got lost the first time I read that article, but it does explain how to use AJAX properly with WordPress.

Let me know if you get lost