Template:Archives by months/doc

Purpose
This template returns navigation links to the existing talk page archives named as subpages by year and month. The three character month abbreviation is returned for each month of the year. If an archive page exists for a specific month the corresponding three character month abbreviation returned is a link to that archive page. This template is typically used multiple times within an archive box template to build a nicely formatted set of archive links by month over multiple years.

The default is to look for subpages of the root talk page with names of the /Archives/YYYY/Monthname format (e.g. Talk:YourPage/Archives/2012/December ). There are several possible formats for the archive names depending on the parameters set. The possible formats include:

The template returns links to the pages in Talk:YourPage/Archives/YYYY/Month even if it is located in a subpage of Talk:YourPage. Explicitly, this means that it can be used for archive navigation within your actual archive pages. It would need to be included in what you have defined as your archive header.

Intricacies
If the corresponding /Archives/year/monthname archive page does not exist the corresponding month label will be displayed without a link.

Syntax
or or

Ordered parameters
The first ordered (unnamed) parameter is the year. This is appended to the root talk page name after archprefix. The second ordered parameter, if it exists, is synonymous to  (see below).

Named parameters

 * year :Valid if the first ordered parameter does not exist. It is the text used to append to the base talk page name/{archprefix}/{year}/Month.
 * archprefix :The prefix for your archive names. For example, if the page's archives are located in Talk:YourPage/Archive/YYYY/Month then you would use archprefix=Archive/
 * abbrev3:If this parameter is abbrev3=yes ) then instead of looking for pages with names ending in "January", "February", "March" ..., the template will find pages with names ending in "Jan", "Feb", "Mar", etc. If set to "yes", this parameter supersedes both the numbers and numbers0 parameters.
 * numbers:If this parameter is numbers=yes ) then instead of looking for pages with names ending in "January", "February", "March" ..., the template will find pages with names ending in "1", "2", "3", ... "12". If set to "yes", this parameter supersedes the numbers0 parameter.
 * numbers0:If this parameter is numbers0=yes ) then instead of looking for pages with names ending in "January", "February", "March" ..., the template will find pages with names ending in "01", "02", "03", ... "12".

Examples
will display as:

All the other parameters change the page names that are checked for existence and linked if existing. They do not change the display looks.

Typical usage
The archive box to the right is what is produced by the above code. The example here has no month names which are links because there are no archive files for this page.

If your archives were stored in pages with names of the format Talk:YourPage/Archive/YYY/mmm then you would typically use:

The archive box to the right is what is produced by the above code. As with the previous example, the example here has no month names which are links because there are no archive files for this page.

Similarities to
This template is a fork of Month-year archive nav except that it doesn't display the year. The months on this template do not have a CSS style either. This fork was created because Month-year archive nav is heavily used on Wikipedia and any changes to it could be disruptive.