Custom Post Type Archives by Date (stored as meta value) WP3.1

I would like to implement date-based archive functionality (similar to original WP Archives widget functionality) for custom post type (CPT). What makes it difficult is the fact that I need to group and archive events not by published date, but by event_date stored as a meta value.

For example, I have event CPT registered as following:

$args = array(
    'labels' => $labels,
    'public' => true,
    'publicly_queryable' => true,
    'show_ui' => true,
    'has_archive' => 'past-events',
    'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'event','with_front' => false),
    'query_var' => true,
    'capability_type' => 'post',
    'hierarchical' => false,
    'show_in_nav_menus' => false,
    'menu_position' => 15,
    'supports' => array(
      'title',
      'editor',
      'author',
      'revisions'       
    )
  );
  register_post_type('event',$args);

I would like to generate archive links like /past-events/2011/04, similar to the functionality of WP Archives widget. However, my events should be archived by the event_date meta value. Also, if, say for April 2011, there are more events than my Blog pages show at most setting, I would like to have a correct pagination for pages. And ideally, when viewing a single event I would have correct previous and next event links within that archive page. Hope that makes sense.

I’m using WP3.1 I’ve gone as far as specifing has_archive setting for the CPT. I did look around, but got confused how to proceed. Is that something I have to write myself or it could be done with WP functions or plugins?

Would really appreciate any help and tips.

Many thanks,
Dasha

This doesn’t answer your question fully but it’s an attempt to help.

Take a look at: http://seebz.net/notes/#note-145 Sets up a CPT with date archives and sets up all the necessary rewrite rules.

As for using wp_get_archives() it doesn’t have the necessary hooks of filters for it to work with a CPT so I recommend that you copy the function and alter to your liking.