Add Expiration Dates to Blog Posts and Pages with the PublishPress Future WordPress Plugin

With the help of the PublishPress Future plugin you can add an expiration date to your posts, pages and custom post types. It is active on more than 100,000 websites.

To get started, go to your WordPress dashboard and install the PublishPress Future plugin from the official repository.

After activating the plugin, I recommend that you start by opening the Future page in the Dashboard, and then the Diagnostics tab. If you see that WP-Cron Status is Enabled then you can continue.

In the Defaults tab there’s not much to do. Changing anything here will not affect your existing content.

In the Display tab, you can choose to display the expiration date at the end of your content. Unfortunately this page provides very little customization options. You can add some inline rules to the style attribute of the displayed paragraph. Unfortunately this paragraph doesn’t have a custom CSS class, so theme developers can’t do much with it. Feels like a missed opportunity to make the plugin easier to integrate.

In the Post Types tab you can enable the plugin’s expiration feature for every post type.

Now you can start adding expiration dates.

On the Edit screen, you will find the PublishPress Future panel. Enable Post Expiration and set your time, date and what should happen to the post once it expires. It can be unpublished, deleted, etc.

Update your post and you’re done.

When browsing your posts or pages, there is a new column that shows the expiration date. If it’s not visible, try looking in Screen Options in the top-right corner. Check the corresponding checkbox.
You can also see all scheduled cron jobs created by the plugin on the Diagnostics page.

In conclusion, this is a decent plugin that fulfills a very specific purpose. It requires WP-Cron to be fully functional, which is blocked by some hosting providers. Because of this, some users might have issues using the plugin.

If you are having difficulties with it, I recommend that you consult the documentation and search the support forums. There are almost a thousand existing support threads, so you might find answers to your questions.