Thread

Dear brain,

So my trawl of these hallowed forums (and Devotee, and Google) has failed to turn anything up on this - so I’m turning to you for help, dear hive mind of teh intertubes.

I have a client with an established, fairly large 1.6.x EE site, which has grown beyond the client’s initial expectations to have lots and lots of lovely functional text content (high 100’s of entries rather than thousands, but still growing at the moment).

Content, as we all know, has the annoying habit of going out of date. Now that the site has been running for nearly two years it has become abundantly clear that they need a better way to automatically flag content for review/editing after a certain period of time (which will vary depending on the entry in question).

My inital, quick’n'dirty response to this was to add a custom date field to let the site admin set a review date for entries, and then build some admin only templates to list entries whose review date has passed along with a link to edit them in the CP.

It works fine, but it’s also kind of well, icky, y’know? For one things it’s outside the CP and thus doesn’t fit well with the rest of the publish/edit flow of the site, plus the date field isn’t where all of the other date fields are, and doesn’t have any validation to check that it’s not in the past etc.

“Surely there has to be a better way?”

I’m sure this must be an issue for other content heavy sites, so I’m wondering how other people manage this. Am I missing some blindingly obvious piece of native EE functionality that will lead me and my client hand in hand to up-to-date copy nirvana? Is there a module/extension already out there that can help with this kind of thing? If not should I be building one and retiring to the Bahamas on the literally three or four sales that are bound to follow?

I was thinking something along the lines of…

* The ability to set default review dates on a per weblog basis (as an offset to an entry’s publish/edit date)
* Which could then be overridden on a per entry basis
* Via an interface integrated into the dates tab of the publish/edit screen
* A choice of actions when a review date passes such as
** Show a list of entries to review on the CP homepage a la recent entries/comments do by default
** Set a custom status on the entry in question
** Send an email to the site administrator telling them to update the entry

If you happen to have any (relevant) thoughts/ideas/comments/help/abuse, all of these would be very welcome indeed…

Hi metadaptive,

I think what you’re looking for is Expiration Date. Instead of using this to prevent entries from appearing on the site, you can add the show_expired=“yes”  parameter to exp:weblog:entries tags within your templates. Then you’ve got native functionality and some great add-ons to help with workflow:

Add filters to the Edit page to show expired or ‘about to expire’ entries
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/md-show-expired/

Auto Expire entries at a specified interval set per weblog/channel
http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/auto-expire/

Notify On Expire
http://utilitees.silenz.org/index.php/addons/software/entry-expiration-notification/

Keep in mind that the expired behaviour can be different in the sections of your site. Set your news weblog and it’s templates to cause entries to disappear when then expire, while other content stays on the site, but but can be flagged as ‘stale’, reported on etc.

Hope that helps,

-Brent

Expired entries are definitely the way to go.

You can even add a notice to the entry in question that it might be outdated when it has expired.

{if expiration_date < current_time}
  <div class="notice">Note: This article might contain outdated information.</div>
{/if}

Together with the Entry Expiration Notification add-on this gives you the best way of keeping track of “outdated” entries. Even if you don’t have time to review the entry before it expires, your users will know it might not be relevant anymore. That is, until you can get around to review it.

Greetz,
Wouter

PS: I’m actually flattered one of my add-ons made the list above (Auto Expire). This is probably the first time, so thanks Brent!

Hi Both,

Thanks for the replies - I hadn’t thought about using show_expired=“yes” that way, which is stupid of me as I’m using it elsewhere for events and suchlike - good thinking anyway… combined with Wouter’s extension and Entry Expiration Notification that should let me do what I need…

Cheers guys!

Tom