On a custom-coded website I built out, there was a need to give posts a future date. The visible “post date” was supposed to appear in the future (e.g., February 12, 2026), instead of showing the actual date the post was created.
This was because those posts were considered “Events” and we wanted to show the event date, instead of the post published date. As you may know, you can schedule posts for the future.
However, they won’t display to the end user (since a scheduled post has technically not yet been “Published”).
I used two plugins to help out with this situation. In most cases, some sort of actual events plugin would be ideal. But in this case, I was trying to keep it very bare bones.
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No Future Posts
- This is the Plugin that sets any future-dated posts, in a category you specify, as ‘Published’ (instead of ‘Scheduled’). This lets end users now see the post (which still has a date of the future). This Plugin is also great for “Events.”
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Auto Prune Posts
- That Plugin will auto-trash “old” posts in a category you specify. This is good for making sure no previous/outdated “Events” are showing to the user within the post page.
