DateDetailView should accept less specific dates, ie Year/Month or just Year

[AndrewIngram]

DateDetailView currently expects segments for year, month and day in the URL. This introduces the requirement to have an archive page for each level of the date; ie a year archive, a month archive, and a day archive:

/2012/
/2012/jan/
/2012/jan/06/
/2012/jan/06/blog-entry-name/

I don't think I'm inaccurate in saying that most bloggers (as opposed to news sites) don't usually create more than one post a day, and many (myself included) have a frequency of much less than once per month. This means we're introducing views such as day archive that have exactly the same information as the higher levels. As a URL purist, I don't like unnecessary segments in my schema and unnecessary pages in my information architecture.

In my case my URL structure is as follows, I don't use DayArchive at all:

/2012/
/2012/jan/
/2012/jan/blog-entry-name/

I've achieved this by creating my own version of DateDetailView that removes the use of DayMixin, but I think this can also be achieved by modifying DateDetailView itself to allow looser date matching using configuration of the view itself.

Is this a common enough use case to be worth making the change in Django itself? I think it can be done without affecting backwards compatibility.

[Hiroki Kiyohara]

Patch to accept less specific dates for DateDetailView.

[Hiroki Kiyohara]

I added a patch.

Now, DateDetail takes a attribute to set the unity of dates named date_separate_unit.
The attribute allows a vaule, which daily, monthly or yearly:

• daily: /2012/jan/06/blog-entry-name/
• monthly: /2012/jan/blog-entry-name/
• yearly: /2012/blog-entry-name/

How do you feel about this behavior and implementation?
I think it is better to hear someone's opinion.