Tells your readers when a post may be out of date, marks the stale ones in the Posts list, and emails your editors a weekly list.
This post was last updated 3 years ago; some information may be out of date.
Pruning keeps a tomato plant’s energy where you want it: in the fruit. Start when the first flowers appear, and work from the bottom up.
Built on mwpd/basic-scaffold. Four features in four parts of WordPress, one service each, none of them aware of the others. Read it as a plugin, or as a way of structuring one.
See how it’s built →Old tutorials keep ranking and getting shared long after they stop being right. A post counts as outdated when its last update is older than the limit you set. Publishing counts as the first update; any later save counts as a new one.
A one-line paragraph at the top of outdated single posts. Pages, custom post types, archives and lists are left alone. It comes in the default style shown here, which your theme can change.
This post was last updated 3 years ago; some information may be out of date.
Pruning keeps a tomato plant’s energy where you want it: in the fruit. Start when the first flowers appear.
Editors and Administrators each get an email with up to 20 of the stalest posts, each linked to its editor. When nothing is stale, nothing is sent.
In the Posts list, sortable, with outdated posts marked. Nothing to configure: it appears on the Posts screen and nowhere else.
Under Settings › Reading: after how many days a post counts as outdated, from 1 to 36500. The default is 365.
Download content-freshness.zip from the latest release.
Upload it under Plugins › Add New › Upload Plugin and activate it.
Optionally change the limit under Settings › Reading. The first digest goes out a week later.
# or, instead of steps 1 and 2, # with WP-CLI $ wp plugin install \ https://github.com/\ mwpd/content-freshness/releases/\ latest/download/\ content-freshness.zip \ --activate
It comes with a default style. Restyle it through .mwpd-content-freshness-notice, or dequeue the mwpd-content-freshness-notice style handle and bring your own. To change the markup, copy any template from the plugin’s views/ into content-freshness/views/ in your theme.
It’s sent by WP-Cron through wp_mail(). On quiet sites, add a real cron job; if no site email arrives, add an SMTP plugin.
Activate it per site, or for the whole network: that sets the digest up in every site, and in sites created later. Each site keeps its own setting. Updating a network-active 1.0.0 to 1.0.1? Deactivate and activate it for the network once more.
Deactivating keeps your setting. Deleting removes it and the weekly event, the only two things the plugin stores, from every site of a network.
Content Freshness is the worked example for mwpd/basic-scaffold, a template for WordPress plugins whose complexity grows one service at a time. The features are deliberately modest. They touch four different parts of WordPress, which makes them useful for showing how the scaffold keeps each part separate.
The composition root lists the four services. None of them knows the others exist. The notice came first; each later feature was its own commit, adding a service and a line here without changing the ones before it.
return [ self::OUTDATED_POST_NOTICE_ID => OutdatedPostNotice::class, self::POST_AGE_COLUMN_ID => PostAgeColumn::class, self::FRESHNESS_SETTING_ID => FreshnessSetting::class, self::STALE_CONTENT_DIGEST_ID => StaleContentDigest::class, ];
src/ContentFreshnessPlugin.php, trimmedEach service implements small capability interfaces. A service that isn’t needed for a request is never instantiated, and nothing branches on multisite: the scaffold visits each site for services that ask for it.
register(), never in the constructor.No feature reads the setting itself. They all ask a FreshnessPolicy interface. Bind your own class, for example to leave an evergreen category alone, and the notice, column and digest all follow it unchanged.
use MWPD\ContentFreshness\Freshness\{ FreshnessPolicy }; add_filter( 'mwpd.content_freshness.bindings', static function ( array $bindings ): array { $bindings[ FreshnessPolicy::class ] = My_Freshness_Policy::class; return $bindings; } );
My_Freshness_Policy is your class.The architecture is written down and checked by tools, so a coding agent gets the same guidance as a person, and finds out right away when it strays.
The repository map, the commands, the design principles in short, and the hard rules.
Architecture rules run in the tests and in PHPStan. Every failure says what to do instead.
Before reaching for a singleton or a global, an agent looks up the plugin’s way in docs/patterns.md.
No lowered analysis levels, baselines or deleted tests. Claims are verified against the source, not memory.
public function __construct() { add_filter( 'the_content', … );}
Implement Registerable and add them in register(). See docs/patterns.md.
public function register(): void { add_filter( 'the_content', … );}
docs/architecture-rules.md.Unit, integration, architecture and end-to-end tests, plus PHPCS, PHPStan (level max) and Psalm. CI runs them on PHP 7.4 and 8.3, and the end-to-end suite on WordPress 6.0 and the latest release.
$ composer install $ composer test && composer lint $ npm ci && npm run e2e
mwpd/basic-scaffold is everything above without the features: a service container, an injector, the capability interfaces, and architecture rules that explain their own failures. No runtime Composer dependencies; it runs on PHP and WordPress alone.
Its own page walks through this plugin commit by commit.