One thing I'll mention though is that this is going to cause the search engines to go crazy as those pages set to private will now return 404 not found errors in their search results, and too may of those may cause the search engines to cease indexing your site.

Was hoping to find a way to make all my posts (about 6 years worth) private while allowing the posts going forward to be public. Is this possible without editing the visibility of each post, one at a time?

I would like to have drop down menus of archived post like by month or by year as opposed to the large single entry list

Your only choice left is http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/archives-widget/

That has been a great help and it's much appreciated. I'll be sure to not make that mistake whenever I choose to add the archives to any other themes I might use in the future!

Cheers!

I had dragged and dropped the archives into the section that says main side bar where my links are. Those show up fine. The widgit however does not. No matter where I put it, main sidebar / footers...doesn't matter.

Maybe I should be just looking for a different theme altogether as it seems I'm too dense to understand why the widgets aren't showing up and I can't identify the issue through the links you provided :(

I followed the tutorial. Currently I have the widgit in my main sidebar area as the second option under my main links. The showcase sidebar and the 3 footers are empty at this time.

Checked - http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/widgets-not-showing-up-3?replies=9 and followed advice there - no dice. I also searched back 10 pages as well with no other topics that helped.

I'm looking to have archives just on the main blog itself that can be found at transparencyofadreamer.wordpress.com - I'm not looking to have it on all of my individual pages / posts at this time. Possibly later, but not at this time.

Current theme - 2011.
Left side bar chosen and selected.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong unless I missed a point in the 2011 theme that states Widgits aren't available.

Any feedback would be a great help! Thanks :)

See here for the Archives widget > http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/archives-widget/
See here for creating a Page http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/
See here for using the Archives shortcode. > http://en.support.wordpress.com/archives-shortcode/
Or adding the Archives shortcode to a Text Widget for use in your sidebar. http://support.wordpress.com/widgets/text-widget/

I have a blog via wordpress, however if I am not mistaken it is hosted by crazy domains. If this is so, I should be able to add a plugin such as 'Flexo Archives Widget'. I currently use the Monthly Archives widget supplied by wordpress, however it is getting a little long and ugly on my page. So if I am able to add this plugin, why can't I find the plugin selection on my dashboard OR if I can't add plugins and my assumption is wrong - is there a wordpress widget or something I can do to change the months to years in my archives section.

my blog is: http://www.madaboutcakes.com.au

Thank you so much for the help! Appreciate it :)

And thank you, thistimethisspace, for tagging the thread for Staff support.

Wishing you both a wonderful holiday weekend...

If you edit the post, you can adjust the published date via the Publish box to the right.

The Archives entry was titled “June 201 (1)” but did not correspond to the publication date of the single post that was included in it, which was January 14, 2013. We tried deleting the post, thinking that would cause the widget entry to go away but, instead, the widget entry remained and when we clicked on it, another post displayed with a different publication month and year. We deleted the second post, and a third post populated the “June 201 (1)” widget entry with still another month/year combination. We deleted the third post, and now the “June 201 (1)” Archives entry remains but, when clicked, goes to a WordPress.com “Not Found” page. The one commonality we noted among the three posts we deleted was that the first term in the title of all three was “2013,” and they were the only posts on the site that began with “2013” in the title. So now we have eliminated all posts with a title that begins with “2013," but we have no idea how to get rid of the empty, lingering “June 201 (1)” entry in the Archives widget. Has anyone experienced this issue and resolved it? If so, we would be grateful for any suggestions you can offer on how to eliminate the "June 201 (1)" entry from the Archives widget.

The site at issue is a private site at chogupdate.wordpress.com.

Thank you for any and all suggestions.

[archives]

I think you can probably use the archives shortcode in a text widget as well, but I've never tried it.

Whether or not full posts, permalinked or thumbnails are displayed on Categories Pages and Archives pages is theme dependent ie. it's coded into the template and we cannot edit templates or themes. http://en.support.wordpress.com/themes/editing-themes/

In the majority of themes, posts on category or other archive pages show up just as they do on the main posts page in the blog and the number displayed is also the same. (See this page > Settings > Reading and note how many posts you choose there sets it for all). But in some themes only the beginnings of posts are shown, and in a few themes you only get titles or thumbnails. See here for a theme list of themes that may display the way you want > Category/archive pages: full posts or not http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/full-posts-in-archive-pages/

When I check out a blog I like to look at the archives. The titles to the articles in the archives give me a good idea what the author focus is and wether or not the blog is of interest to me. I would like that same feature so that those who click on my blog can see if there is an article of interest.

http://advocateofhope.wordpress.com
Thanks.