Revitalizing Your Blog’s Past Posts

I tend to write “timeless” articles, articles that will still work two or four years from now. For over two years I’ve been hunting for a method to showcase past articles on Taking Your Camera on the Road on the front page, giving a fresh audience a look at these older but still valid articles. I’ve searched for keywords like “featured posts”, “past posts”, and a variety of other combinations. It wasn’t until I was searching for something totally unrelated that I stumbled across the solution: Malyfred of Skriker’s Archivist WordPress Plugin.

It’s a miracle I even stumbled across it. The author admittedly doesn’t speak English and the site is pretty much a photoblog with little text, but it was a treasure worth finding.

The Archivist WordPress Plugin looks in your database for posts that are older than today, or whatever date you set such as older than 60 days ago, and showcases them on the front page of your WordPress blog. You can feature the post in it’s own CSS styles so it will look different from the rest of your front page posts, or just let it blend it with the rest of your posts. It’s a fairly flexible Plugin to work with.

To use, download the Archivist WordPress Plugin. Open the PHP file in a text editor and change the information per the article to set the results of the featured post. Here are two examples:

To show five posts at the top of your front page from categories with ID numbers 8, 10, and 12:

1. Set 'number_of_posts' as 5
2. Set 'frontpage_position' as 0
3. Set 'from_categories' as 8, 10, and 12

To show only one post older than 45 days under a title of “Featured Post”, and have it sit under the third post entry on your front page list:

1. Set 'number_of_posts' as 1
2. Set 'frontpage_position' as 3
3. Set 'from_categories' as empty
4. Set 'older_than' as 45
5. Then set 'title' as “Featured Post:”

Save the Plugin php file and upload it your site’s Plugin directory and activate it.

That’s it. Brilliant.

If you would like to make the featured archive post look different from the rest of your posts, there are two basic methods.

To add a graphic file to the post to make it a bit different from the other posts, in the Plugin’s php file’s title option, add a link to the graphic:

---

$archivist_settings['title'] = '<img src="https://lorelle.files.wordpress.com/feature.gif" alt="" class="right">Featured Article: %title';

---

To control the CSS styles of the featured post so you can put the featured post(s) in a box or change the background image, you will have to move lower in the Plugin file to change the output. On or about line 157 which begins with $draft->post-title, change the following section in that line of code to something like the example “archivist” class:

---

$draft->post_content = "<div class=\"archivist\"> {$draft->post_content} </div>";

---

In your CSS stylesheet, add the archivist class and set it look like whatever you want. Here is an example that puts a red border around the featured post:

---

archivist { border: 2px red solid; padding:10px; }

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The old posts featured will be only see on the front page of your blog. It will not show up in your feed, a feature I’m still looking for. For now, I have to feature old posts manually, in a new post, in order to get them into my feeds.

If you want to reach back into your posts from the past and give them new life on the front page of your blog, as I did with Taking Your Camera on the Road, the Archivist WordPress Plugin is the way to do it. Thank you, Malyfred, for revitalizing my old articles.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network