Thread

Is it possible to display only weblog entries which expired on a given day? If not using existing tags, can someone help me—a bear of very little brain—construct a query to do it?

I ask because I am trying to create a weblog database of people, using the entry date for their birthday and the expiration date, rather literally, as the date of their death.

I would then like to use this information to make a page that displayed individuals in the database born on that day (MM/DD, in any year) and individuals who died on that day (again, MM/DD, in any year).

A little help?

Hey, the stop_before param might be what you’re looking for.

In short, something like this, but read the docs I linked to for more details.
show_expired=“yes” stop_before=”{current_time format="%Y-%m-%d %g:%i %A"}”

I think it may be trickier than that.  Show expired will get them to show- but it won’t prevent non-expired from showing.  Might could remove those via a conditional based on expiration date, though.  Not lean and it would jam up pagination, but if you don’t have a ton of entries, it might work.

Otherwise- I think I’d go with a query.  If you need to poke that option, say the word and I’ll shift this over to ‘How to’ for brainstorming the query.

Well, I guess I’m definitely in the market for a query and, as one of the SQL-challenged, I’d welcome all the how-to help I can get. Thanks!

OK- let’s shift this over to ‘how to’- and I’ll show you a cheat.  We’ll do a tiny query in php to collect the ids, then echo that back in the entry_id parameter of the weblog tag- so it only pulls those entries.  The query bit is actually really easy.  The localization/time stuff?  Not so much.  Are you localizing?  In other words, can members set their own localization?  If so- we’ll use the php here to figure out the correct localized time for ‘today’.

No, I’m not localizing. All entries will be normalized to a single time zone.

OK- I don’t have a great way to test, but this isn’t throwing errors.  See if it works for you- should only pull stuff with an expiration date sometime today- and it’s gmt.

<?php
global $DB, $LOC;

$ids = 1;
$month = date('m');
$day = date('d');
$year = date('Y'); 


$start_time = $LOC->set_gmt(mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year));
$end_time = $LOC->set_gmt(mktime(23, 59, 59, $month, $day, $year)); 

$query = "SELECT entry_id, expiration_date FROM exp_weblog_titles WHERE expiration_date >= $start_time AND expiration_date <= $end_time";


$results = $DB->query($query);

    if ($results->num_rows > 0)
    {
        foreach($results->result as $row)
        {
            $ids[] = $row['entry_id'];
echo $row['expiration_date'].'
';
        }
    $ids = explode('|', $ids);
    }

echo $ids;
    
?>



{exp:weblog:entries entry_id="<?php echo $ids; ?>"}
{title}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Note- php has to be turned on for the template and parsed on input.  Also- it defaults to showing id 1 if there are no expired entry today.  For some reason, putting in 0 as the default ends up ignoring the entry id parameter.

Anyway- give it a shot.

Anyway- give it a shot.

After having to put this project aside for a while, I came back to it today. This doesn’t work for me, although it’s possible I’m being somehow dense about it.

I created a test weblog, called “test” and entered a few dummy posts with assorted expiry dates, including today. Put the code above into a template, set it to parse PHP on input.

The resulting output is just this:

1207293000
Array

This is on EE 1.6.3, build 20080319.

Any thoughts?

$ids is an array, not a variable. Try

<?php var_dump($id); ?>

to see what I mean.