Question

I am currently trying to make a e-zine using wordpress, and have most of it done. The homepage displays a list of the “pieces” which are included in that edition of the e-zine. I would like to make it so that, when an edition expires (currently using Post Expirator plugin), a new page is created automatically resembling the front page in showing the index of that particular (now expired) edition.

I’m not very experienced using PHP, and still a newbie at wordpress. How could I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Here is what I ended up doing, using the suggestions of Felipe as a starting point. There might be a less convulted way of doing this, but, as I said, I’m just a beginner, so this is what I came up with:

First, I created a volnum variable, which keeps track of the current volume number. Then, I cache the front page so that later I can save it as an independent html document:
This is at the beginning of the index.php, before the get_header().

<?php $volnum; ?>
<?php ob_start(); ?>

In the front page, I have an editorial and, next to it, I have the content index. I am saving the editorial tag’s (which is always “voln” where ‘n’ is the volume number) volume number (maybe the foreach is not necessary since the editorial only has one tag) :

<?php $tags = get_the_tags();
      foreach ($tags as $tag){
        $volnum = $tag->name;
      }
?>

Finally, at the end of the document, after the last html, I have added the following code:

<?php
    $handle = opendir("past_vol/");
    $numOfFiles = count($handle);
    $volExists = false;
    for($i=0;$i<=$numOfFiles;$i++){
        $name = readdir($handle);
        if($volnum.".html" == ($name)){
            $volExists = true;
            continue; 
        }
    }
    if($volExists == false){
        $cachefile = "past_vol/".$volnum.".html";
        $fp = fopen($cachefile, 'w'); 
        fwrite($fp, ob_get_contents());
        fclose($fp);
    }
    closedir($handle);
    ob_end_flush(); 
?>

“past_vol” is the directory where I am saving the past volume html files. So the directory is opened, the amount of files is counted, and a loop that goes through each file’s name is started. If a file with the same name as $volnum, then $volExists is true. If at the end of the loop $volExists is false, then it saves the cached page.

Again, it could probably be optimized a whole lot, but for now this works!