Notification Box for Old Content

This question came up from Jason Tucker and it will be the topic on WPwatercooler this Monday March 21st at 11am. The question was how to notify your site visitors that they are reading old content.

What you shouldn’t do:

Don’t delete the old content. People are getting to your site from old links but they are getting there. Don’t make their life difficult by getting a 404 message.

What you should do:

Notify them they are visiting old content and direct them either to the new content or just direct them to a generic spot to find the “newer” info.

I found this plugin by Bill Erickson Old Post Notification, but I wanted a little more oomph and automation. The plugin only gives you a check box that you have to manually check each post that it’s “old”.

You could use this plugin Juiz Outdated Posts which gives you a settings page to apply a notification to all posts older than X dates.

Create a custom function that then puts the notification anywhere you want it. See below for this method.

How to setup a notification box:

First I found this post that creates a function that can filter posts based on how old the post is back x amount of days.
Display Ads only on Older Posts

Then I created this snippet of code in my functions.php

https://gist.github.com/lorennason/5e9a0ceafbd7883ddf41

See example here -> Old Post

Conclusion:

I like the Juiz Plugin. It’s simple and it will work for many people.

I like the custom code solution as it makes it easier to place anywhere in your site. Maybe even make a Pop Up notification?