Herodotus – On This Day vs Minimalistic Event Manager

Herodotus is a specialized tool for creating recurring historical events based on Day and Month, making it perfect for “This Day in History”, birthdays, anniversaries, or any annual recurring timeline. Unlike the default WordPress behavior where posts are tied to a specific publication year, Herodotus introduces its own herodotus_post Custom Post Type. You simply pick a day and a month from the custom date picker in the block editor, and your post will automatically appear on that exact day every single year. Key Features: Dedicated Custom Post Type — keeps your regular blog posts completely separate from historical events. Custom Taxonomy — group historical events into categories like “Science”, “Politics”, “Birthdays”, etc. Annual Recursion — just set “May 15” and the post appears every May 15, forever. Three Layouts — standard list layout for pages, compact layout for sidebars and widgets, and a plain text layout with no images at all. Shortcode & Gutenberg Block — use [herodotus] or the included block to display events anywhere. Year Support — set the year of the event for display purposes. Year Badge — the historical year is displayed as a badge on each event card, so visitors immediately see when the event occurred. BC/AD Era Support — mark events as BC or AD. BC events are sorted chronologically before AD events. The “AD” label is shown in the year badge when selected. Category Filtering — display posts from a specific category using [herodotus category="history"]. Category Labels — category is displayed on each event card and on the single event page. Hide Images — show posts as text-only using [herodotus show_image="false"]. Open Graph & Twitter Card — automatic meta tags for beautiful social media sharing previews. Schema.org Markup — JSON-LD structured data (Article, Event, CollectionPage) for better SEO and Google rich results. Automatically disabled if Yoast SEO, RankMath, AIOSEO or The SEO Framework is active. Timezone Aware — strictly respects your WordPress timezone settings. WPML & Polylang Ready — includes wpml-config.xml for full multilingual compatibility. Translation Ready — includes translations for Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Turkish. Caching — built-in transient caching for fast frontend performance. Sortable Admin Columns — the posts list in the admin shows “Herodotus Date” and “Year” columns, both clickable to sort your events by date or year. Quick Edit — change the day, month, year and era straight from the posts list, without opening the editor. RSS Feed — /herodotus/feed/ delivers today’s events, refreshed every day. Works with RSS readers and automation services. Available Shortcode Attributes: [herodotus] — show today’s posts using global settings. [herodotus layout="compact"] — compact view, ideal for sidebars. [herodotus layout="text"] — plain text list: no images, no card borders. [herodotus limit="5"] — limit to first 5 posts. [herodotus category="history"] — show posts from a specific category (use slug). [herodotus excerpt_words="15"] — set custom excerpt length. [herodotus show_image="false"] — hide images, show only title, excerpt and Read more. [herodotus order="DESC"] — reverse sort order for this instance (overrides the global setting). [herodotus_random] — show a random pick out of today’s events. Accepts limit, category, layout, excerpt_words and show_image.

This plugin (MEM or Minimalistic Event Manager) is intended for theme authors and developers who want a simple, robust and flexible solution for managing event dates. The MEM plugin offers a clean interface that allows to add event dates (start dates, end dates, repeating dates) to posts (and to any custom post type). The main features Event dates can be attached to any post type: Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types… (optionally, they can be restricted to specific content types). Event dates can be of three types: start dates, end dates, repeating dates. There is no mandatory date format: Time, Day, and Month are optional. An event date could be “January 2046”, or just “2046”. What the plugin doesn’t do The MEM plugin works as a simple interface for entering those dates into custom fields, but it won’t do much on the public side of your theme (there’s a simple widget for displaying a list of events). The plugin was created primarily to enable theme developers to create their own display of events on the front-end. If you aren’t sure how to achieve this, our wiki will provide a collection of examples to get you started. Technical implementation Technically, the MEM plugin stores the dates as ordinary Custom Fields, in a machine-readable format (such as “2016-11-23 13:37”). This gives you absolute freedom for displaying your events in your theme: You can query for specific date ranges by using the meta_key / meta_compare parameters. You can use the php date function to display the date in any possible manner (or date_i18n for proper localization). Plugin options The plugin has two settings that can be modified with a few lines in your functions.php file: You can limit it to specific post types. You can use an “alpha” mode, which gives you a blank input field for each date. This can be useful if you need to enter dates that don’t fit the predefined format. See the online documentation for the full instructions. Links Documentation Credits Concept and maintenance ms-studio.net Initial development: Dream Production