Wordpress Sidebar menu for posts based on date - guidance needed

Question

One of the issues I have with WordPress is knowing when (and when it is possible) to use the WordPress back end instead of coding my own solution from scratch. This question is based around this.

I'm attempting to set up the blog page for the site I'm working on. Most of the site is static pages, with the posts ideally being collected on a news page. I have the news page displaying the posts through the traditional set up (selecting the static front page, and selecting a page to be the blog page through the WordPress dashboard). With that done, I want to create a sidebar for the blog post (and all posts) that displays a list of years and months. Example sidebar:

August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 ... October 2013

This seems like something that would be built into WordPress, but I can't seem to find any information on it. So I ask you all, is this a built in function? If so, could you direct me towards a good starting point? If it is not, how would you suggest developing links to posts based off of a time stamp?

Apologies again for the low level question. I know just enough to get my hands dirty here, but I have a ways to go on the learning curve.

Answer 1

Go to

Dashboard -> Appearance -> Widgets.

You are looking for Archives widget.

If your theme has built in sidebar, you'd just select the appropriate widget in that sidebar.

To create a new sidebar in your theme, you need to use register_sidebar() in your theme's functions.php.

To include a sidebar in your file, you'd use get_sidebar() in your theme file. You can include the sidebars dynamically from the admin panel there.