Time Machine

Time Machine is a simple plugin that grab N published articles from database (posts and/or pages) published on current day and/or offset of time in past years, and list them in widget or block.

User can set widget title, number of displayed articles and message shown when there is no public articles in past.

Features

• Shortcode, legacy widget, block-based widget and Gutenberg block, all with the same options
• Set the number of articles to list
• Set a custom message for days with no articles in the past, or hide the whole list when there is nothing to show
• Include or exclude pages, and optionally exclude articles from the current year
• Set offset and offset direction (before, after or both) with a time range in days, weeks or months
• Optionally show an excerpt with a custom length; it is generated from post content when there is no manual excerpt
• Optionally show the number of comments
• Lists only published articles (drafts are never included)
• Password protected articles are excluded unless you explicitly enable them; when included, the manual excerpt is used if there is one, otherwise no excerpt is generated from the content until the visitor unlocks the article (same as WordPress core)
• Works with full page cache plugins: the list is refreshed after page load through a small REST endpoint (can be disabled with a constant in wp-config.php)
• Site Health check warns you if a REST API restriction blocks that refresh, and tells you how to fix it
• Cached queries that are cleared automatically whenever a post or page is saved
• Clean, semantic HTML5 markup that validates without errors, styled by your theme’s CSS

Download

Installation

Getting started with Time Machine takes less than 2 minutes. Choose your preferred installation method below.

Alternative installation methods

wp plugin install time-machine --activate

How To Use?

After activation on Plugins page, add widget via Appearance → Widgets or block via Appearance → Editor → Templates, proceed with widget/block configuration.

What is “Time range”?

By default, Time Machine will list only posts published on same month day in past years. But, you can set offset and force displaying posts published, for example, on same day and three days before (if today is October 10th, you’ll get posts published in range from October 7th to October 10th in previous years).

Frequently Asked Questions

define( 'TIME_MACHINE_DISABLE_REFRESH', true );

define( 'TIME_MACHINE_DISABLE_REFRESH', true );

add_filter(
	'rest_authentication_errors',
	function ( $result ) {

		if ( ! is_wp_error( $result ) ) {
			return $result;
		}

		$route = isset( $GLOBALS['wp']->query_vars['rest_route'] )
			? ltrim( $GLOBALS['wp']->query_vars['rest_route'], '/' )
			: '';

		if ( 0 === strpos( $route, 'time-machine/v1/' ) ) {
			return null;
		}

		return $result;
	},
	99
);

Screenshots

Credits

Note about Google News

User Obragblog noticed an issue with older versions of the Time Machine and reported on community support forum.

Just a note of caution for folks working to rank in Google news… this plugin does exactly what the author says it will, I thought it was a great feature but shortly after implementing it Google News stopped picking up any posts.

Investigating this through Google webmaster tools showed me that links in the Time Machine sidebar widget were causing Google to reindex old posts and killed my ranking as articles had “Date too old“. A few days after I disabled the plugin google news is back, but it really killed my traffic for about a week.

Need help?

If something isn’t working, please open a support ticket with details about your issue. We’re committed to helping you get it up and running.

Please check our FAQ section before opening a ticket to see if your question has already been answered.

If Time Machine satisfy your requirements, we’d appreciate a review!