Flagging a Post as Outdated Using WordPress Custom Fields

If you write a blog whose primary purpose is to help people find and remember information (mostly myself in this case), then it’s probably a good idea to flag certain posts as out-of-date so as not to mislead people who are on a quest for knowledge. That is, of course, if you know it’s outdated. Maybe someone will tell you.

In any case, here’s how you can do it using Custom Fields in WordPress.

Find a post that’s out of date and edit it. Down towards the bottom of the page, there’s a section labeled Custom Fields, click it to open it, and enter something like this:

Use whatever name you want for the key and value, but be sure to change the related fields in the other places I’m about to mention.

I want the notice to show up on the post’s permalink page, so in single.php, I put this right after the start of ‘the loop’:

$status = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'status', true);

As you can probably guess, that just grabs the content for the ’status’ key for the current post and stores it in the variable $status. Easy. If the post doesn’t have the value, the get_post_meta tag is nice enough to fail quietly (as far as I can tell).

Now that you have this very valuable information, you can change CSS, add a warning message, or whatever your little heart desires.

For example:

if ($status == 'outdated') include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/outdated.php');

Sources

• I got the idea from Bryan Veloso’s Avalonstar
• WordPress Codex / get_post_meta
• WordPress Codex / Using Custom Fields