Anything that doesn’t have this category will not show up in your blog feed, but is still searchable on the website.

In “new-school” terms, I want archived posts (in an existing installation of WP) to not be visible in the feed, but still able to be found in a search.

The site is changing from a “place for a few people to rant” into a legitimate journalism site (at least I hope so).

The existing content doesn’t fit into the new mission of the site, so I don’t want it openly displayed. In the spirit of good journalism, however, I do not want it to be deleted or “unfindable”.

Am I explaining that clearly? I cut my teeth in journalism with paste-boards and screen photostats, so I’m not always up on how the cool kids do things these days. ??

While a technically valid solution, it would be problematic from a practical standpoint.

That would require that every editor, author, and contributor know that they have to click that checkbox, and actually do so. I’m too much of a realist to expect that to happen. And, if we’re dealing with something time-sensitive, missing that one checkbox could be a serious issue.

I’m looking for a solution where any new posts appear by default, but any old posts aren’t displayed (except in a search).

I was hoping there’s an existing plugin that does this. If not, I’m willing to manually add a flag in the DB and something in WP (if [archive]=1 then “only display in search”). I’m just worried that any manual tweaks will disappear during an update.

I’m looking for a solution where any new posts appear by default, but any old posts aren’t displayed (except in a search).

I don’t see how this differs from what WordPress does by default. On Settings > Reading admin page, you choose a number of posts that are shown in the feed. That uses the date for determining the order.
The Latest Posts and any list pages also order by date by default, newest first.
So what is there to do?

I don’t see how this differs from what WordPress does by default.

Every WP theme I’ve seen has a “view previous” or “view older” link in the feed. It allows you to go back and view every post every made. I want the “view previous” to stop at a given date.

e.g., WP install has 15 years worth of posts. As of 2020-01-01, I want everything published previous to that date to NOT show up when you click “view previous” (disappear from the feed), to NOT show up if you view the category they’re in, to NOT show up on the posting calendar. The ONLY way to find them is to use the search box.

You can define a custom post type based on post and set all the old posts to that type. It’s a simple database change of the post_type field. Then they are different from normal posts and won’t show in the standard lists or categories. (that is if you make their categories and tags separate taxonomies for the new post type)
But if you mark the custom post type searchable, then it would show in the search.

I don’t see the benefit of doing this. Having a full database that is never shown seems strange. People couldn’t browse the old, only search it. Strange.

OK, you are using a different definition of feed than I am.

I thought that might be the case. In old-school talk, the “feed” is all the news that comes in or goes out. And RSS feed is a subset of that: “news that goes in/out via RSS”

You can define a custom post type based on post and set all the old posts to that type.

Thanks. I’ll look into that. My DB skills are somewhat rusty, but I can call in help.

I don’t see the benefit of doing this. Having a full database that is never shown seems strange. People couldn’t browse the old, only search it. Strange.

It’s a “reboot”. The value of the site is the domain name and the reputation of people associated with it.

The new approach of the site is 99.44% different from what it previously was. Allowing the old content to have the same value as the new content would muddle the message and cause problems.

On the other hand, deleting all the old content would make it look like the site is trying to deny what it used to be–not a good thing for a newspaper to do.

This sort of compromise is not uncommon in the publishing world; older volumes are “put in the archives”–not publicly displayed, but available for anyone that wants to dig through the filing cabinets.

Now this is getting more complicated than my meager skills might be able to handle. Hence my hoping that there was a plugin that could do it all for me. ??

(I’m a writer and marketer, not a coder.)