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Display Future Posts in Your WordPress Theme

Maybe this happened to you once

All of a sudden you have a lot of inspiration and ideas for posts on your blog. Your head is full with first class content and you want to write 5 posts… one after another. But since we all know that publishing all these posts at once is a waste of energy, we decide to spread the new content across several days or even weeks.

Or maybe you go on vacation for four weeks (lucky you!) but you want to keep offering your ‘Friday Web Design Blog Review’.

Wouldn’t it be nice to run your blog on autopilot?

To set a post on schedule to be publihed on a certain date at a certain hour is quite easy. In the write post panel in the right sidebar you’ll see the ‘Publish Status’ box. Under ‘Keep this post private’ it says ‘Publish immediately’. Click on ‘Edit’ next to it.

A form opens up where you can change the timestamp of the post. Here you can set the exact date and hour when you want you post to be published. If you choose a future date your post will appear as scheduled in the manage posts overview.

Your blog runs on autopilot now!

What else can we do with this timestamp feature?

Now we know that we can save posts with a future date. But can we display them on our blog? Yes, we can. And because we can, I had the idea of building an Upcoming Events list like in the example below.

In my example we have a list with upcoming events and onther list below with previous events. Please note that the upcoming events list is in chronological (ascending) order. Once a future event date passes, it will automatically change to the Previous Events list.

First I want to show you how to call the previous events. Since these are normal posts, we just make a normal query for posts of a certain category - here events. If there are no previous events, the phrase No previous Events will be displayed.

<h4>Previous Events</h4>
 
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=events');
?>
 
<?php
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
?>
 
<ul>
  <li>
    <strong><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>:</strong><br />
    <?php the_title(); ?>
  </li>
</ul>
 
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
 
<ul>
  <li><?php _e('No previous Events'); ?></li>
</ul>
 
<?php endif; ?>

Now we try to display the future posts just adding some arguments to the post query.

<h4>Upcoming Events</h4>
 
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=events&post_status=future&order=ASC');
?>
 
<?php
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
?>
 
<ul>
  <li>
    <strong><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>:</strong><br />
    <?php the_title(); ?>
  </li>
</ul>
 
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
 
<ul>
  <li><?php _e('No upcoming Events'); ?></li>
</ul>
 
<?php endif; ?>

Please note that the WP_Query function now only asks for posts with post_status future and will display them in an ascending (chronological) order. If there are no upcoming events, the phrase No upcoming Events will be displayed.

Put it all together

In my example I want to display the upcoming events on the top and the previous events below. So here you get the complete code:

<h4>Upcoming Events</h4>
 
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=events&post_status=future&order=ASC');
?>
 
<?php
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
?>
 
<ul>
  <li>
    <strong><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>:</strong><br />
    <?php the_title(); ?>
  </li>
</ul>
 
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
 
<ul>
  <li><?php _e('No upcoming Events'); ?></li>
</ul>
 
<?php endif; ?>
 
 
<h4>Previous Events</h4>
 
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=events');
?>
 
<?php
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) :
$my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
?>
 
<ul>
  <li>
    <strong><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>:</strong><br />
    <?php the_title(); ?>
  </li>
</ul>
 
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
 
<ul>
  <li><?php _e('No previous Events'); ?></li>
</ul>
 
<?php endif; ?>

Now just style the list to your liking and you have a nice automatic events list divided into upcoming and previous event.

Tags: future posts

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