On This Day (by Room 34)

Description

On This Day (formerly “Room 34 presents On This Day”) is a simple widget that displays a list of blog posts that were published on the same date in previous years. Customization options include:

• Title
• Message to display if no posts are found
• Maximum posts to display
• Show featured images (if available)
• Category filtering
• Optional On This Day archive page (new in version 2.0)

Important: While not technically required, the On This Day archive page assumes your theme includes an archive.php file that uses the the_archive_title() function to display the page title.

Installation

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Place the widget in one of your sidebars and customize as desired.

Note: This plugin requires PHP 5.3 or greater due to the use of anonymous functions (closures).

FAQ

Why isn’t the archive page displaying the correct (or any) title?

If there’s an incorrect title, or no title, at the top of your page (before the title of the first post), check your theme. It should have an archive.php file, and that file must use the the_archive_title() function to display the page title.

Reviews

Very good!

cueyelink October 28, 2024

My personal blog is largely based on this plugin. The front page only shows posts that are up to date. I have tested a number of plugins, all were disappointing, but this one works fine.

Best!!!

madinfinity April 3, 2024

This is the best and only plugin to display Day in HistoryThanks to the developer!

Been looking for this for ages

darro November 17, 2020

Pretty much the same as doubledown00 I’ve been looking for a addin like this for ages Well done, easy to use.

I have been looking for this for awhile!

doubledown00 May 10, 2020

I’m not real big on leaving reviews in general but I’m leaving one here. If adding more reviews helps bring attention to this plugin and makes it more popular, so be it! I have blog entries and stuff I imported from previous platforms going back to 1996. I have been looking for a way to highlight some of this old content based on date, similar to how Slashdot.org does it in their “This Day on Slashdot” widget. The only thing is I couldn’t find anything that would do it. There were plugins that would do “this day in history” and other criteria. But I couldn’t find a plugin that would do it based on content entered in Wordpress. The plugin its self is *very* easy to use. Install, activate, and add it as a widget wherever you want it. Done. There are some settings you can tweak regarding how many entries to show, what categories, etc. I had the whole thing up and running in five minutes.

It Really Helped my Weblog

dorfdimpaler January 14, 2020 2 replies

I’m an outdoor writer and one day I realized: “I’ve got 15 years of content here!” I wanted a way to showcase that. This plug-in was just what I needed. My posts are all seasonal and deer and turkey hunting really don’t change from year to year, so my readers have not only what I’ve recently written, but also years and years of stuff that I’ve written on the subject. Many thanks!

works well

Andrew Huey September 3, 2016

This is just a nice little plugin to show posts on the current day in previous years. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it works great.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

3.4.0 – 2024.10.09

• Added support for Categories option when using the Widgets Block Editor.
• Added functions.php file and r34otd_boolean_check() function to more flexibly handle boolean values for certain shortcode parameters.
• Refactored all code that directly echoes variable values to use standard WordPress escape functions; additional minor code refactoring.
• i18n: Updated translation strings in .pot file.
• Updated copyright details.
• Bumped “tested up to” to 6.7.

3.3.0.1 – 2024.08.05

• Bug fix: Modified conditional in R34OnThisDay::widget() to prevent PHP undefined array key error.

3.3.0 – 2024.08.01

• Added Include post types option to support Custom Post Types as well as standard posts. (The built-in public post types “page” and “attachment” are not supported, as pages are not intended to be date-based, and attachment pages really shouldn’t exist.)
• Grouped “Additional Options” in widget configuration under a <details> expander.
• Modified archive template to remove restriction that omits any posts published “today.” Added code to potentially include custom post types, but left commented out for now because this really should have an admin setting to manage which post types are included. (Without that, post types from common third party plugins like WooCommerce and The Events Calendar would be included, grouped under their publish dates, which is illogical for the user experience.
• i18n: Updated translation strings in .pot file.
• Bumped “tested up to” to 6.6.

3.2.1.1 – 2024.04.23

• Modified conditional that could cause an Undefined array key error in some cases.
• Bumped “tested up to” to 6.5.2.

3.2.1 – 2024.02.11

• Admin: Updated content and layout of shortcode guide on admin page.
• Bug fix: Incorrect alias key in line 29 of widget.php.
• Shortcode: Added support for custom excerpt lengths by setting an integer value for show_post_excerpt. Support for this feature will be added to the widget in a future update.
• i18n: Updated translation strings in .pot file.
• Bumped “tested up to” to 6.4.3.

3.2.0.1 – 2024.01.04

• Rolled back CSS styling (font sizes/margins) based on negative user feedback. Styling will return as an option in a future update.

3.2.0 – 2024.01.01

• Added Show post dates and Show post excerpts options. (To conserve space in the widget, excerpts use the excerpt_length and excerpt_more hooks to override site defaults; length is shortened to 25 words if longer; “more” is always ....)
• Changed: Front end post dates now show year only unless Show post dates is checked.
• Added CSS to adjust relative sizes of titles, dates and excerpts, reduced white space in CSS files, and added logic to append the version number to the enqueued CSS files.
• Reorganized admin widget configuration interface.
• i18n: Added .pot file for translation strings.

3.1.2 – 2023.12.20

• Updated widget output to use get_the_title() instead of retrieving the post’s title property directly, allowing for use of the the_title filter.

3.1.1 – 2021.11.20

• Updated plugin name on admin pages.

3.1.0 – 2021.11.20

• Changed displayed plugin name from “Room 34 presents On This Day” to “On This Day (by Room 34)”.
• Changed require_once() instances in main plugin file to use plugin_dir_path() instead of dirname().
• Updated tags in readme file.
• Bumped “tested up to” to 5.8.2.

3.0.2

• Removed support for the Category option if the widget block editor is enabled (included by default with WordPress 5.8). The functionality for loading the category list and saving that option does not work with the AJAX-based tools in the block editor, and the presence of this option was causing the plugin not to load at all in the widget block editor, although it still functioned properly on the site itself. If you wish to restore the old widget editing functionality, we suggest trying the Classic Widgets plugin.

3.0.1

• Changed shortcode behavior to return output instead of echoing it directly.

3.0.0

• Added shortcode support. Use [on_this_day] anywhere shortcodes are supported. All of the regular widget options are available as shortcode parameters. See the plugin’s new settings page for details.
• Oh yeah, there’s also now a settings page! Go to Settings > On This Day.
• Added code to handle an arbitrary date (currently only works with shortcode, not widget).
• Fixed issue that was causing admin CSS file to load on front-end pages.
• Created separate front-end CSS file.
• Coming soon: translations!

2.5.1

• Modified conditions to show current year’s posts in widget when “Use post date” is set.
• Improved help text in widget configuration.
• Added text domain to i18n functions in preparation for translation support.
• Minor CSS tweaks in admin.

2.5.0.2

• Fixed displayed publish date of posts to resolve issues when post’s publish time falls on a different date between local time and GMT/UTC+0.
• Bumped tested up to version to 5.5.3.

2.5.0.1

• Fixed incorrect callback function name in pre_get_document_title filter.

2.5.0

• Replaced all closures in actions and filters with named functions to give developers more flexibility in working with the plugin.
• Removed “On This Day” from archive page titles in keeping with the goal of avoiding any hardcoded front-end text until full i18n support is implemented.

2.4.1

• Made ‘See all…’ text string editable in widget configuration. This was the only non-editable text displayed on the front end. Making this text editable will allow for easier use of the plugin on non-English language websites while full i18n support is in development.

2.4.0

• Replaced uses of PHP date() and WordPress date_i18n() function with wp_date() for improved i18n support. (Full i18n support for all displayed text strings coming in a subsequent update.)

2.3.0

• Removed “See all…” links when a date has no posts.
• Removed “On This Post’s Date” when on archive pages.
• Fixed logic for “See all…” pages to work with a specific (not today’s) date.

2.2.2

• Added option to hide widget entirely when list is empty by leaving “Message to display if no posts are found” blank.
• Modified logic for hiding redundant lists so that if two lists on the same page are both empty and “Message to display if no posts are found” is set, then they’ll still appear.

2.2.1

• Added logic to prevent duplicate list of posts from appearing multiple times on one page. This allows creation of two widgets, one for showing today’s posts, and one for “Use post date” posts, for example.

2.2.0

• Added “Use post date” option to widget. If set, when viewing an individual post, the widget will show posts from the same date as the current post, not today’s date. On main blog or archive pages, widget will still show posts from today’s date.

2.1.0

• Added month/day filtering of Posts in admin to show all posts published on in given month/date.

2.0.2

• Fixed handling of a global array variable to resolve fatal errors with WP-CLI.

2.0.1

• Simplified date_query.

2.0.0

• Added On This Day Archive page.
• Refactored to use date_query instead of retrieving and then omitting posts from the current year.

1.5.3

• Made featured images clickable links to posts.
• Tested in WP 4.7.1.

1.5.2.1

• Updated “Tested up to” to 4.7.

1.5.2

• Fix for implode() warning when no categories were selected.

1.5.1

• Updated plugin repository description text.

1.5

• Added ability to filter list by category.
• Added ability to set maximum number of posts to display.

1.4

• Added option to display featured image with each post.
• General refactoring and code clean-up.

1.3

• Updated main function to use parent::__construct() for compatibility with WordPress 4.3.

1.2

• Updated link structure to use standard permalinks instead of custom-built URL format.

1.1.1

• Updated “Tested up to” tag.

1.1

• Added CSS class to ul tag and changed tag and class attribute for each li item.

1.0

• Original version.