Archive WordPress Content with the Archived Post Status Plugin

WordPress plugin developer Frankie Jarrett has been on a roll this month, pumping out plugin releases on WordPress.org. Last year, Jarrett sold ChurchThemes.net to Lift co-founders Chris Wallace and Brad Miller. Since that time he has been focusing on product development for WP Stream, which has allowed him a few extra minutes to create some free extensions for WordPress.

At the end of December and in early January, he released five small but highly useful plugins:

Compact View Mode

User Session Control

Prevent Concurrent Logins

JSON REST API Force SSL

Archived Post Status

Several of his latest creations are handy for membership sites and web applications. Archived Post Status caught my eye, because adds more flexibility for using WordPress as a CMS. The plugin adds a new post status that enables posts and pages to be archived. This effectively allows you to unpublish content without having to send it back to draft status.

WordPress’ default post statuses currently work very much like an on/off switch as far as a finished post is concerned. Of the eight default statuses, Published is the only one that is public, while all the rest remain behind the curtain in various states of unreadiness. None of the statuses, apart from Published, adequately indicate that a post is complete or finished.

Fortunately, WordPress makes it possible for developers to register their own custom post statuses, which is what Jarrett did with this plugin. He created it for sites where content is not always meant to be evergreen. It allows you to archive posts in the same way that you might archive email.

Archived Post Status is compatible with posts, pages, and custom post types, giving you a wide array of possible use cases:

Archive pages or posts from a conference or event for editing and re-use next year

Archive real estate listings for records

Cycle portfolio content in and out of the site as necessary

Temporarily remove listings from a site that indexes businesses or organizations

Archive products to bring back for future use

While custom post types seem to be one of the most likely uses for this plugin, you may not want to have the archived status available to all post types. Jarrett includes a filter that allows you to exclude the Archived status from appearing on certain post types.

Some might be wondering why you wouldn’t use the Draft status, since the Archived post status essentially puts a post in the same state. To use drafts in this way would be to split its purpose into multiple uses, which are not clearly separated when sorting. If you are looking for previously published content that is complete, while hunting through all drafts in progress, you have to be fully knowledgeable of all the content on the site and use your memory to do the sorting. The archived status keeps everything nicely sorted for future use.

If you need a non-public archive of completed posts, this simple plugin will do the trick. I tested it and works exactly as advertised. Download Archived Post Status from WordPress.org.