Do you have a blog? Want to use your blog to inspire change? This episode explores how a blogger followed her passion and grew a mega following in a few short years. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help […]
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Recently, one of our users asked if it was possible to back date their WordPress posts. The answer is YES. WordPress allows you to change dates on any posts that you write. You can publish a post with current date and time, back date it to a past date and time, or you can even schedule posts to be published in the future. In this article, we will show you how to back date your WordPress posts.
Start by editing the post that you want to back date in your WordPress admin area.
On the post editor screen, under the Publish meta box you will see the option to publish the post immediately. Right next to it, there is an edit link. Clicking on the edit link will display the post’s time and date settings.
Using the date and time settings, you can choose any date and time in the past as well as in the future. Choosing a future date and time will allow you to schedule the post to be published on that time.
On the other hand, choosing a date and time in the past will update the date and change the post’s position in your site’s archive pages. For example if you change the month of a post from June to January, then it will appear on the January’s monthly archive page even if you just published that post. The post will also appear accordingly on the all posts list page in the admin area.
This is particularly useful when you want to publish an article, but don’t want it to appear on the front page of your site. You can just back date it to a date earlier than the last post on your site’s front-page.
Some users believe that they should remove dates altogether from their blogs to trick search engines into believing that their content is not time-sensitive and is always fresh.
We disagree with that opinion entirely. It does not help with your site’s SEO, and it’s terrible for user experience. See our article on why you should not remove dates from your WordPress blog posts for more information on this topic.
At WPBeginner, we show the last updated date of an article instead of the publish date. Last updated dates are particularly useful for sites where content is regularly updated. Here is how to show last updated date on your WordPress blog posts.
Locate the code that shows the post’s date and time in your theme files (usually in loop.php or single.php). Next replace it with this code:
Last updated on <time datetime="<?php the_modified_time('Y-m-d'); ?>"><?php the_modified_time('F jS, Y'); ?></time>
We hope this article helped you learn how to back date WordPress posts. You may also want to see our guide on how to display relative dates in WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
To leave a comment please visit Beginner’s Guide: How to Back Date Your WordPress Posts on WPBeginner.
Easy Digital Downloads announced a major change to its themes marketplace today. All official EDD themes (those that are built by the EDD core team) are now 100% free. This includes half a dozen themes that are guaranteed to be fully compatible with EDD, including the new Vendd theme launching today.
EDD support manager Sean Davis clarified how the free themes will be supported:
Official EDD themes are available to you at absolutely no cost. They will still be licensed so that you can receive theme updates directly from your WordPress dashboard and we will also provide support. The only thing changing is the price.
Responding to criticism on Twitter saying that the change contributes to the undervaluation of WordPress themes, EDD founder Pippin Williamson said, “For us it’s not about the themes. It’s about the entire package. By making it easy for users to have a good shop up and running in minutes, we significantly increase the potential value to that customer and of that customer. We also dramatically reduce the cost of support by having more users on more reliable themes that are built for EDD.”
Making half a dozen themes free might seem like it would significantly increase EDD’s support burden, but Williamson expects that the move will pay off in other ways. Like many other WordPress business owners who have made some of their best work free, Williamson has a strategy for how it will work.
“The change lowers the barrier to entry,” Williamson said. “When the barrier is lowered, the user base grows. When the user base grows, the customer base grows. From a business side, we will have far more success converting free users to paid customers after they’ve already been given a great experience with a theme.”
@nphaskins Not sugar coating it at all. We'll make 5x more by giving them away than we did selling them @sdavismedia @natewr
— Pippinsplugins (@pippinsplugins) June 4, 2015
This major change is in line with EDD’s basic freemium business model, which has been in place from the start. The core product(s) are free and satisfied users go on to make purchases from the add-ons marketplace.
“By setting them up with a good theme from the get go, the likelihood that they become a paying customer is substantially higher,” Williamson said.
So far, the freemium model has worked well for the company and making six theme products free makes sense when the business primarily revolves around plugins. After just three years in business, EDD pulled in roughly half a million dollars in revenue in 2014. As themes were not a significant portion of the revenue, Williamson is re-assigning them to be free products in order to continue to build a customer base for his plugins.
WordCamp San Francisco has traditionally been one of the most important WordPress events of the year where Matt Mullenweg delivers his annual State of the Word address. Last year, he announced that the the event had outgrown the Mission Bay venue and that it would be expanding to become WordCamp US in 2015.
Touch the walls as you walk out, as this is the last time we'll have #WordCampSF here! ~ @photomatt #wcsf14 #endofanera
— WordCamp SF (@WordCampSF) October 26, 2014
The decision to seek a new venue in a new city was partly based on the need to make room for more attendees and presentations. Another benefit of moving the event out of San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world, is that it will likely become more accessible to a greater number of people.
WordCamp US will follow a format similar to WordCamp Europe in that it will be held in a rotating city. The city has not yet been selected, which is surprising given that the year is nearly halfway finished.
Mullenweg put out a call for host city applications on his blog and linked to a survey where candidates can apply.
There are a lot of cities out there that might be an excellent fit for WordCamp US, but many are lacking a vibrant local WordPress community to help support the event. While this is not stated as an explicit requirement, it would be difficult to pull off such a large event without an army of local volunteers.
WordPress is aiming big for its first ever WordCamp US. The survey states that host city applicants must secure a venue with hotels within three miles that can support 1,500 – 2,000 attendees. Potential organizers must supply average hotel costs for a range of budgets and average flight costs from the West Coast, East Coast, Midwest, Mexico, and Canada.
Hosting the event will be a massive undertaking that will require an organization team capable of putting everything together in a very short amount of time. Events of this size normally have the benefit of longer planning periods. For example, applications to host WordCamp Europe 2016 closed two months ago and the team is already training volunteers for next year’s event.
If your team is up to the challenge of hosting WordCamp US, you’ll need to be prepared to submit venue information with room capacities, a detailed event budget, potential dates, and contributor day options. So far, Mullenweg has received in-person pitches for Phoenix but the application process is open to teams from any city. When WP Tavern readers were surveyed seven months ago, commenters favored Chicago, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Houston, and Dallas.
WordPress.com announced major improvements to its Stats feature today. The new Insights tab gives users a bird’s eye view of posting activity and visitor trends. The Stats panel now displays all-time numbers for posts, views, visitors, and the day the site received the most number of views.
Insights also calculates the most popular day of the week and the most popular hour based on when the site gets the most views on average.
Posting Activity is another new addition that provides a way to visualize how often you are publishing. The feature is reminiscent of GitHub’s Contributions calendar, which makes it easy to view contributions from specific times. Insights allows you to mouse over a specific date with a color marker to see how many posts were published that day.
If, for some reason, you’re missing the old version of WordPress.com’s stats, it is available for a limited time under wordpress.com/my-stats/.
Insights is not yet available on WordPress mobile apps but will likely be added soon. When asked when Insights will be available to self-hosted users, WordPress.com representative Jonathan Sadowski replied, “If you install Jetpack and enable the Stats module, you’ll be able to view these stats on WordPress.com for your .org blog.”
Stats is arguably one of the most popular features in Jetpack and a major factor for many in the decision to connect with WordPress.com. However, the view from inside the self-hosted Jetpack stats panel is starting to look a little dated when compared to the mobile apps or WordPress.com. Adding Insights to Jetpack’s stats panel would save users a trip over to WordPress.com to discover this information.
Most people don’t have the time or motivation to log into Google Analytics and create a meaningful interpretation of that data to improve their publishing habits. The new and improved stats with Insights offers a better understanding of when you’re posting and even interprets your traffic to provide actionable data, such as what hour might be the best for scheduling a post, what months lend you the most time to commit to blogging, etc.
The all-time stats also make it easier to track your blogging progress and set milestones for increasing posts, views, and visitors, and ultimately beating your best traffic day on record. The new feature is live on WordPress.com today and we’ll be watching for it in future updates to the mobile apps.
Müller penned a farewell Gist on GitHub in his native German, which Caspar Hübinger was kind enough to translate into English.
For me, a chapter of my life is coming to an end. A chapter that has brought an abundance of experience, learning, and fun. A chapter that, on the other hand, demanded a lot of time, nerves, and motivation. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I deeply hope my software and my commitment may have made the WordPress community a bit better in terms of quality.
Müller is discontinuing his WordPress contributions due to health reasons, but he plans to find a suitable successor who will be able to deliver the level of quality and support that his users have come to expect. His plugins, most notably Antispam Bee, Cachify, Statify, wpSEO and Optimus, are used widely around the world, particularly throughout Germany, Austria, and the germanophone parts of Switzerland.
Hübinger, who is active in the German and European WordPress communities, has been using Müller’s plugins for the past six years.
“Just as valuable for me personally were his blog posts and tutorials,” he said. “I pretty much learned WordPress development from his blog, and Frank Bueltge‘s.
“There are a lot of comments expressing great surprise. No one saw him quitting, obviously. Sergej has been a key figure of the German-speaking WordPress community for the last nine years. While not quite so popular beyond the Germanophone context, I think his note that almost every WordPress user over here has heard of or uses at least one of his plugins is no exaggeration.”
While Müller does have a couple commercial plugins available, he has never made a living from them. For the past nine years he has been working as a software engineer outside of WordPress. Anyone aspiring to adopt his plugins will need to meet the high standards that he has set in terms of quality and support, especially in regards to supporting the German community.
“Monika Thon-Soun, a WordPress veteran from Austria, mentions she doesn’t remember a single instance where one of Sergej’s plugins would have been hacked,” Hübinger said. “Given the popularity of his plugins, that’s truly worth mentioning, as it underlines a character feature that everyone loves him for: reliability.”
Müller’s plugin contributions have always been a hobby for him but he is no longer able to sustain their development and support. He is currently in conversations with parties who are interested in his projects and will announce the new maintainers once it has been finalized.
Sergej Müller’s contributions signify the importance of having WordPress extensions and tutorials available for users to learn WordPress in their own language. His role in cultivating the German development community and supporting its many users will not be easily filled.
“As a friend, I understand and support his decision completely,” Hübinger said. “As a WordPress user, it’s…a catastrophe.
“Whoever follows him on G+ will have seen occasional moments of disappointment. In those moments, you could see all his passion. Because it really wasn’t about money for him. Acknowledgement and paying it forward is his favorite currency.”
Have you ever wanted to hide a post from your WordPress home page? While you can make WordPress posts password protected or private, in some cases you may simply want to hide the post from your homepage while still allowing others to view it if they have the URL. In this article, we will show you how to hide posts from selected pages in WordPress such as homepage, category archives, feed, search results, and more.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Hide Post plugin. The plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure.
All you need to do is create a new post or edit an existing post that you want to hide. On the post edit screen, you will find a new meta box labeled ‘Post Visibility’.
Using the checkboxes under post visibility, you can hide a post on home page, archive pages, category, and tag pages. Simply check the boxes where you want to hide the post and click on Update or Publish button.
You can now visit your website, and you will notice that post will be hidden on your selected pages.
However if a user has the URL, they can still view the post on its own page.
To find out the URL of a hidden post, visit Posts » All Posts. Next, locate the post you are looking for and take the mouse over to the post title. You will see a link to view the post.
The plugin also works for WordPress pages. For pages it will show you visibility options allowing you to hide a page from appearing in page lists.
We hope this article helped you hide posts from WordPress homepage, archives, and category pages. You may also want to checkout our guide on how to make your WordPress blog completely private.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
To leave a comment please visit How to Hide a Post From Home Page in WordPress on WPBeginner.
