Template code or shortcode to show days until expiration

That’s a really nice idea… but horribly complicated, given the number of different possibilities with expiration types, categories, post stati and so on.

It would be easy to implement if the expiration dates were “static” – i.e. stored directly in the database as metadata or something – but the plugin deliberately works out expiration on the fly, so that changes don’t cause a big re-query and re-storage of data (and so there’s none of the micro-management involved in such systems). My intention was to allow admins to change their criteria at will, and have everything run behind the scenes.

I know there are other expiration plugins that have this facility and store individual dates for each post’s expiration as metadata, so there are alternatives if you really need that data displayed… the downside is that most of them (if not all) need micro-management for the expiry dates. That’s the reason I wrote TIEexpire to do things on the fly – it was too much work to do things per post!

As I say, though, a very nice idea. I’m currently working on a new version of TIEtools (which includes TIEexpire) which I hope will be more of a “construction kit” approach to expiration, so I’ll add this to my list of thing to consider and see if I can find a neat way to do it without too much querying and stuff…!!

Thanks for your feedback!

Maybe there’s an easy exit just printing out the date the post was set to expire. If the plugin can send an email saying that it is about to expire, maybe using the same email [exdate] and making that a shortcode or template tag?

The plugin doesn’t forewarn of expiration: the notifications go out when posts are expired, after the fact.

I honestly can’t think of a way to implement this given the way the plugin works (without meta). It would mean checking each individual post against each individual expiry method and all the exclusions, every time each post was accessed… or doing a massive all-post update every time the criteria were adjusted. Both of those are an awful lot of messing around (and server load)!

In simple terms, the plugin’s deliberately not built for a per-post setup, because there are already plugins to do that and it wasn’t what I wanted for my own sites.

I’ll keep puzzling over it, though. Maybe there’s a sneaky workaround. 🙂

That’s interesting… how do you have it working for user roles? They’re not in the plugin design, so I assume you’re doing something with categories?

(And that’s another idea to add to the list, allowing expiry by role… hmmm!)