Feature Suggestions: Include This Year + Include Post Excerpt

  • I’m using this plugin, which works well after fiddling around and learning how to properly implement it. I have a bit of a non-standard case that I believe has potential solutions all users could implement.

    [Background: I’m trying to replicate the functionality of the “This Day In History” widget that is no longer available because it’s not been maintained and has security issues. The idea is you go to a given page and you get a list of historical events that occurred on this day in history. Takes a bit of fiddling around due to issues like WordPress won’t let you publish posts in dates BCE (or before 1927), and everything is keyed to the post date.

    Suggestions for general purpose:

    1 – allow users to include posts from this year; right now by default it only shows prior years, which means if I create a historical event for today, I have to backdate the post by a year for the plugin to pick it up. No bueno for SEO; all my new content looks like it’s a year old.

    2 – allow a shortcode toggle to include the post excerpt just like the one for the featured image.

    Suggestions for my purposes: Add an event date field, perform matching/filtering for “today” on that field also (best practice; allow for one or the other or both). This would allow for a much broader range of event dates and implementation as a “this day in history” plugin with pretty minimal tinkering…but enough that it’s over my pay grade as a PHP scripter! Right now I can kind of kludge it together to get most of the functionality I want – see https://johnhenry.us/jh-just-history for an example – by putting each historical event in a post dated one year ago on that date, and I can control the display order by setting the specific time – the later the post time on a given date, the earlier it shows up in the displayed list.

    NB: For whatever it’s worth I couldn’t make this function as an in-page widget, but only using the shortcode. I haven’t tested the widget in a proper sidebar/widget area.

    Unfortunately I’m not in a position to make promises about paying you, but I’ll certainly bump you way up on the list of things I want to pay for even though I don’t have to and hopefully get you taken care of in due course. As this functionality is quite deeply entangled with my social media visibility, it should “pay for itself” over the course of a few months or a year at most.

    Thanks for your hard work and an excellent tool!

    (Edited to add: TDIH source is available through their plugin page here; it may be worth looking at for notions on how to handle the data. I *think* it’s GPL but I can’t swear to it right this second.)

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by JohnHenryUS.
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  • Thread Starter JohnHenryUS

    (@lowgenius)

    Hunt -n- peck: adding “+1” to the year on line 214 of widget.php fixes the “no display for this year’s posts” problem: 

            $date_query = array(array('before' => array('year' => wp_date('Y') + 1)));
    Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    Thanks for these suggestions. It’s intentional that the plugin only shows past years, although I can see how this would make sense to be optional, along with optionally showing the excerpt. I’ll look into adding these in the next update.

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