WordPress – Making Post/Page Content Expire
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.
Category: Web Development, Wordpress
About the Author (Author Profile)
David is the owner and main author of Artiss.co.uk. By day he's a developer for a well known UK retailer, by night he looks after this site and write WordPress plugins.Subscribe
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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
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.