On the down side, i noticed that the archives page takes a little longer to load initially (i don’t think it takes as long the second time). But the advantage of applying Ajax techniques to the archives is that it eliminates page refreshes, which means that browsing through the archives becomes a lot faster and easier as a whole.

Installing the plugin was fairly easy.

1. Upload the entire “af-extended-live-archive” folder to your wordpress plugins directory.
2. Add < ?php af_ela_super_archive(); ?> to your archives template.
3. Enable the plugin in the wordpress admin.
4. Navigate to the “Options » Ext. Live Archives” tab to recreate the cache.
5. Add the css file (or copy and paste the code) to your site.
6. Optionally, modify the css file to suit your needs.

So far, i’m really happy with it. The only potential problem that i saw was for people browsing the site with javascript disabled. These visitors would see nothing at all. Even though this is a pretty clean default result (as opposed to printing out some nasty error), i wanted everyone to be able to use the archives page.

As a quick solution, and because i had only hidden (commented out) the original code (xhtml) when i added the ajaxified archives code, i decide to simply add < noscript > < / noscript > tags around the old code that was commented out. This would effectively hide the old code from browsers with javascript enabled, while showing it only to visitors with javascript turned off. With the javascript fix in place, i think this plugin might be a keeper..