[wp-hackers] Simple Idea for Expiring Posts

[Dennis Williamson]

Some people have asked for a way to expire posts.

http://wordpress.org/support/10/10546

http://wordpress.org/support/4/11122 (refers to rss, my idea doesn't 
address that unless indirectly)

Here is a solution that I came up with and I'd like comments, please:

In index.php, immediately after The Loop begins (just below the foreach), add:

	<?php list ($post_expired) = get_post_custom_values('postexpire'); /* only 
pay attention to the first one if there's a duplicate */ ?>

	<?php if ( !$post_expired || current_time('mysql') < $post_expired) : /* 
if there's no expiration date or it's not been reached yet, go ahead with 
displaying the post */ ?>

Just before the endforeach, add:

	<?php endif; /* end not-expired test */ ?>

For any post you'd like to expire, add a custom field with the key of 
'postexpire' and the value of the date you'd like the post to expire in 
"mysql" form (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss).

The post is still in the database and could be edited to un-expire it. 
Existing posts can be retroactively expired.

You can future-date a post with the edit timestamp option and set it to 
expire later. If you set the expire date earlier than the future-publish 
date, the post won't appear.

I don't do any error checking on the value and I ignore any duplicates in 
the post. Additional code could be added to do each of these.

It could be made into a plugin, but it's so short it just seems easier to 
include directly in index.php.

Dennis