Filter a library by year Free

Minutes, newsletters, magazines, accounts, annual reports: a lot of libraries are organised by the year a document belongs to, and the first instinct is to create a category or a tag per year. It works, but every January there is a new one to create, and the category list fills up with numbers.

The year filter reads the year from each document’s date instead. Switch it on and a dropdown listing the years the library actually spans appears with the other filters — newest year first, and only years that hold a document.

Free — included in every FileDeck install.

Turn it on

Site-wide: Documents → Settings → Features → Show a "year" filter.

Per library: add show_year_filter="1" to the shortcode, or switch on Year filter on the Elementor widget.

[filedeck show_year_filter="1"]

The filter appears only when the library spans more than one year — a dropdown with a single choice is noise, so a library whose documents all date from this year shows nothing until next year’s arrive.

What year a document has

The document’s date — the publish date WordPress records, which you can edit on the document’s edit screen (the "Publish" box, or the date field under the title in the block editor). Set it to the date the document is about rather than the day you uploaded it: a 2019 newsletter dated 2019 files itself under 2019, and the library’s date column and "newest first" sort follow the same date.

If you are bringing an archive over from files on disk, the bulk upload and the Pro CSV import get the files in quickly, but neither sets the date: every document starts dated the day it was added, so set each one’s date on its edit screen afterwards.

Pinning a library to one year

The shortcode’s year attribute does the same job with no control:

[filedeck year="2025" category="minutes"]

gives you "the 2025 minutes" as a block for a page of its own. Combine year with category, tag or anything else; it simply narrows the library to documents dated in that year.

Sharing a filtered view

The year a visitor picks lives in the address bar like every other filter (?filedeck_year=2024), so the Copy link button above the library, and a plain copy of the URL, both reproduce the view. See sharing a filtered view.

FAQ

Can visitors pick a year and a category at once?

Yes. The year filter works alongside the category, tag and custom-field filters, and the counts beside the other filters’ options update to reflect the year chosen.

Does it work in the folders layout?

Yes. Folders that hold no document from the chosen year collapse out of the way, exactly as they do for a search.

Does it work on very large libraries?

Yes. Past the size where a library switches to server mode, the year list is read from the whole library rather than the page on screen, and the pick is applied on the server.

I already have "2024", "2025" categories. Should I remove them?

Not necessarily. If your documents’ dates are right, the year filter will give visitors the same result with no maintenance, and you can retire the per-year categories at your own pace. If the dates are not reliable, keep the categories — the filter reads dates, not names.