echoz

The archives within WordPress are pretty limited in a sense that they do not offer much configuration beyond what they do. Date based will be date based, like category based archives will only display categories. This plugin mitigates the issue by giving date based archives the ability to list content by categories as well.
This is done via modification of the rewrite rules to allow for the ability to have permalinks like http://yourblog.com/2008/in-blog/. This basically is a date based archive that shows only entries from the “blog” category.
This plugin can also work without the usage of rewrite rules. It currently supports date based archives for years and months.
<h3>Usable Commands for Theme Developers</h3>
The PHP commands for theme developers to use are pretty straight forward.
cba_get_category_id() returns the current category ID of the archive.
cba_the_year() returns the current year of the date based archive.
cba_the_month() returns the current month of the date based archive.
cba_auto_thedate() gets the string representation of the date.
cba_get_year_link($year) returns the permalink for the year archive based on the current category.

Category Based Archives

Allows date based archives to be listed by category.

Bill Erickson

The Genesis Grid plugin was design to allow users of the Genesis theme to easily display their posts in a grid format.
“Features” are full-width posts at the top of the listing. “Teasers” are the posts broken into columns. You can set the number of Features and Teasers for both the homepage and inner pages, and how many columns the teasers are broken into.
You can also specify the image sizes used for Features and Teasers. I recommend setting Features for Large, and Teasers for Medium. Then go to Settings > Reading and set the dimensions of those images as needed. If you have already uploaded images, use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to rebuild the thumbnails at these dimensions. If images aren’t showing up, make sure you have “Include featured images” checked in Genesis > Theme Settings > Content Archives
Finally, you can specify where the grid loop is used by checking Home, Category Archives, Tag Archives, Taxonomy Archives, Author Archives, and/or Search Results. See the Developers section for more fine-grained control.
<a href="https://github.com/billerickson/Genesis-Grid/wiki" rel="nofollow ugc">Documentation</a>
No support will be provided by the developer

Genesis Grid

Customize your archive pages in Genesis to use a grid layout. Requires the Genesis theme.

Category Based Archives vs Genesis Grid