Add an Expiration Date to WordPress Sticky Posts

photo credit: This Year’s Love – cc

WordPress’ sticky posts feature was introduced six years ago in the 2.7 release. It was added to enable users to stick important posts to the front page so that they won’t disappear in a blog’s steady stream of chronologically ordered content.

By default, a sticky post is sticky indefinitely and requires you to manually uncheck the box under the post’s visibility settings in order to remove its stickiness. Expire Sticky Posts is a new ultra-simple plugin that allows you to set an expiration date on your sticky selections.

The plugin, created by Andy von Dohren, is a fork of the Simple Post Expiration plugin by Pippin Williamson. Expire Sticky Posts adds a date entry box to the publish panel for setting an expiration date if the post has been checked as sticky.

The plugin is perfect for automating the management of seasonal sticky posts and important time-sensitive notices. Also, some themes rely on sticky posts for setting the featured content on the homepage, requiring you to manually change them out. This plugin allows you to set up future dates for expiring sticky posts at the time that you publish them, so you don’t have to log in and change it later.

I tested the plugin and found that it works as advertised. The only thing I would add is the ability to set a specific time in addition to the date, as this may be important in some instances. If you find the Expire Sticky Posts plugin to be useful and have any further feedback, feel free to leave a note in the issues queue of the project’s GitHub repository.