WordPress – Making Post/Page Content Expire

Written by

2nd June 2010

| Time to read is

1–2 minutes

There are some excellent plugins available to allow you to make time sensitive posts and pages expire. However, these work for the entire post/page rather than just a section.

Here’s the simple solution – a shortcode that you wrap around some content and allows you to specify a date on which it should expiry and simply not display anymore.

Add the following code to your functions.php file in your theme folder…

add_shortcode('expire','expire_text');
function expire_text($paras="",$content="") {
   extract(shortcode_atts(array('date'=>''),$paras));
   if ( ($date!="")&&(date("Ymd")>$date) ) {$content="";}
   return $content;
}

Now, simply add [expire date="yyyymmdd"][/expire] around any text you wish to expire – change yyyymmdd to a date in that format.

For example… [expire date="20101231"]It's 2010![/expire]

This will display the message “It’s 2010!” until after 31/12/2010.

This is the quick solution – a much fuller version, with expiry time as well as the ability to get content to appear on a specific date/time, will be released as a plugin soon.

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Comments

6 responses to “WordPress – Making Post/Page Content Expire”

7th October 2010

SEOrocks

Hiya

Many thanks for sharing the above method.

is there a way to display a message replacing the section that will be removed after the date has expired? for example: This Event is no longer Available – check back later

Thanks in advance
S

Reply
1. 8th October 2010
  
  David
  
  Yes. As well as making content disappear after a set time, you can also make content appear when you want – so you could use the shortcode to make one section disappear and then use another shortcode to make the next bit of content appear. The instructions gives full detail on how to use both of these methods.
  
  Reply
28th July 2012

Rob

Looks like the ability to show content after a date got removed in simplification. I tweaked and came up with a function to do it:

add_shortcode('showafterRC','showafter_text2'); function showafter_text2($paras="",$content="") { extract(shortcode_atts(array('date'=>''),$paras)); if ( ($date!="")&&(date("Ymd")<$date) ) {$content="";} return $content; }

I don’t know a thing about php, but it was pretty obvious what needed to be changed 🙂

Reply
1. 30th July 2012
  
  David Artiss
  
  Hi Rob,
  
  Yes, my original code was only intended to hide content after an expiry date. Your modification does the opposite – content doesn’t appear until the date specified.
  
  David.
  
  Reply
1st May 2014

Sandy

HI there, wondering if you ever released the plugin mentioned above? If it does what you reckon I’d happily buy it as a premium!

Reply
1. 1st May 2014
  
  David
  
  I did indeed Sandy. No longer supported but available for free here – http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-timed-plugin/
  
  Reply

WordPress – Making Post/Page Content Expire

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6 responses to “WordPress – Making Post/Page Content Expire”

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