altering the archive template

1) You will need to enable yearly archives first. Open up the monthly listing template in the template editor, go to the bottom of the editor and create a new mapping for "yearly" archives. Then, open the Archive Index template, and modify one of the examples in there for an archive listing so that instead of doing, say, Category-Monthly, it does Yearly instead.

2) Modify the category listing in that index template to look similar to this:

<mt:TopLevelCategories>
<mt:If tag="CategoryLabel" eq="Value1 or Value2">

</mt:If>
</mt:TopLevelCategories>

Thanks. First issue solved. I didn't realize the mapping option was there.

I'm not quite understanding your solution for #2. This is the main archive.html page I'm trying to get it to list only items from certain categories. And the tags you mention aren't included on that page. I'm guessing you're suggesting I add them somewhere in the loop on that page but I'm not sure where.

This seems to be the code that's generating the archives list:

<mt:ArchiveList archive_type="Yearly">
        <mt:ArchiveListHeader>
                         
                                <div class="archive-content">
                                    <ul>
        </mt:ArchiveListHeader>
                                        <li><a href="<$mt:ArchiveLink$>"><$mt:ArchiveTitle$></a></li>
        <mt:ArchiveListFooter>
<li><a href="http://southeastreview.org/old-archives.html">(older)</a></li>
                                    </ul>
                                </div>
        </mt:ArchiveListFooter>
    </mt:ArchiveList>

So where would categories tag go in there?

Thanks again.

You should have a category listing block in the Archive Index. That's what you need to modify.