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.

Michael Torbert

Once activated, only posts from the current category are displayed in your loop (no posts from sub cats). 
That’s all it does. No options. If you find you need options, let me know and I’ll build them into it.
As of 0.4 I remove the filter after the main query is built so that it doesn’t interfere with widgets. 
If you have a custom query or call wp_query on a category archive template, you’ll need to add and remove the filters before and after your query. Below is an example of how to do this if you use wp_query. Again, this is not necessary unless you have modified queries in a template file.
<pre><code>add_filter( 'posts_where', 'ft_nscp_mod_where' );
query_posts( array( 'your-custom' => 'args' ) );
remove_filter( 'posts_where', 'ft_nscp_mod_where' );
</code></pre>
Its important that you remove what you add.

No Sub-Category Posts in Loops

Once activated, only posts from the current category are displayed in your loop (no posts from sub cats).

Category Based Archives vs No Sub-Category Posts in Loops