Time has to be set in GMT

Thanks, this is an interesting scenario. So your server and WP installation are both at local time, but you want expiry to work in GMT? Or am I misunderstanding?

No. Sorry for my unclear explanation earlier.

I’m not actually sure what the server time is, but WP time is set as local time (GMT + 3). For some reason the plugin requires the expiry time to be set in GMT in order for it to hide post at certain time. For example if I want expiry to happen at 13:00 PM local time I need to set time as 10:00 AM.

Oh I see. Yes, GMT offset (I think that’t the endpoint at least) is slated for the next version.

My WordPress site is set to be local time which is GMT -5. When I manually edit a post to set an expiration date and time, the plugin seems to immediately compare the expiration time to GMT rather than to local time. This makes testing very difficult since I can only set expiration 5 hours later than current time. My development system is in the local time zone so I must wait 5 hours to verify that expiration works.

My test system in the time zone GMT -7. It appears that the sql code that runs to expire posts uses the local time of the server, rather than the local time of the WP site as defined in settings. So the post is expired two hours later than it should be and makes testing even more delayed.

At least this is what I infer from my testing.

I hope that the next version will correct both of the time comparisons.

I find this plugin very useful and despite the time issues it works just fine for most purposes when only the date is really relevant.

As you plan the next version please consider two options:
– offer option to select the post status to be used when a post is expired. “draft” is not really an appropriate status for expired posts. I have configured am “expired” status for this purpose, but it could be any valid status.

– offer option to retain the expiration date in the post, as reference for admins and editors to use in deciding what to do with expired posts. For example, I will want to delete long expired posts but keep more recently expired ones.