WordPress – Making Post/Page Content Expire

This post was written 1 year 8 months 12 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

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;
}

(The above code has been simplified since the post was originally created)

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.