Hello,

if you order categories by category order, all articles will be grouped by category.
Then, use 'consolidate' in the 'categories' section of the 'layout' tab to show the category titles for the first of all items of the same categories.

What is missing is ordering alphabetically for the categories, which is planned for a further release.

For the dates:
you can select articles by month or year by using the date apply range: relative dates.
There is no 'grouping' at this time, in the sense that there is no 'header' for each new month or year.
Right now, a workaround would be to create separate instances of the module for every month you need. With the relative dates option, you can create an instance that shows articles for the last month, an instance that shows articles for the month before that... and so on.

I will look into adding headers per month/year in a further release.