7 WordPress Time and Date Plugins to Keep Your Site Ticking

As a new year approaches, thoughts naturally turn to the subject of time. And so in that vein, here are seven WordPress plugins that revolve around the time/date theme.

1. WP Scheduled Themes (DOWNLOAD HERE)

Do you have a special theme you’d like to display on New Year’s Day? Will you be sleeping in instead of attending to your site?

No problem. Enter the WP Scheduled Themes plugin.

This plugin lets you schedule a change in your site’s theme on whichever day you’d like. It also lets you set an end date for the theme. One other nice function is that it lets you set up this schedule to occur yearly. So if you regularly switch to a certain theme at certain times of the year, you can set it up once and have your site change at just the right times.

2. Dynamic Dates (DOWNLOAD HERE)

The Dynamic Dates plugin lets you insert shortcodes to automatically create user-friendly dates on the fly.

For example, let’s say you had a meeting every Sunday. You could insert a shortcode that would automatically let a visitor know the actual date of next Sunday’s meeting.

This is a relatively simple example, but you can get more sophisticated with it if you like. In order to see different types of options, you will need to read the instructions on the WordPress plugin page (there is no settings page for the plugin).

3. Auto Future Date (DOWNLOAD HERE)

This plugin allows you to randomly automate publishing future posts within certain parameters. For example, you can tell it to publish a post between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. anywhere from one day from the last published post on the site to five days from the last published post on the site.

This is good for bloggers who write a lot of posts at once but then want to space them out.

4. Date/Time Now Button (DOWNLOAD HERE)

This plugin adds a “Now” button to your publish screen that lets you change the publishing time of  a post, page, or comment to the current time.

This is a handy plugin for anyone who does a fair amount of editing on posts, pages, or comments and would like to republish the page at the current time and date (as opposed to leaving it published at the original time and date). It’s also a nice feature for reconfiguring scheduled posts to be published at whatever the current time and date are.

In the example below I scheduled a post to publish at 10:32 p.m. (22:32). I then hit the “Now” button and it automatically changed the time for the current time – 2:32 p.m. (14:32).

5. Magic Dates (DOWNLOAD HERE)

This handy little plugin lets you use shortcodes to calculate the number of years from a certain year and insert that number into your text.

For example, let’s say you wrote something last year that read, “He has 12 years experience in his field.” That’s fine, but now it’s a year later, and so he has another year of experience. Enter the Magic Dates plugin.

See an example of it in action:

6. Hetjens Expiration Date (DOWNLOAD HERE)

This plugin adds a meta box to your visual editor page that allows you to set the post to expire. When the post expires, it is moved to the trash. It is not automatically deleted permanently, however, unless you have your trash set to automatically empty.

 7. Easy Timer (DOWNLOAD HERE)

The Easy Timer plugin provides you with a huge number of shortcode options for counting down to something, counting up from something, revealing hidden content when a certain date is reached, and more.

For a very simple sample of this plugin in action, see below.

But this plugin can do A LOT more than this. I recommend looking at some of the extensive documentation for it here.

Photo: 2012 – Wall Calendar Displaying New Year Date from BigStock