Wordpress Plugins: Scheduled Post Shift Plugin

November 8th, 2007

On a few sites I have there is information that is pretty much timeless, but it will sit dormant because there is nothing I need to add to it that often. My Agloco site is one that I have that problem with because there just isn’t a ton of information that needs to be added to it, and news is particularly scarce. So rather than pulling your hair out trying to keep all these sites updated, and ending up in drug treatment this plugin is pretty handy.

The Scheduled Post Shift plugin can be applied to sites such as that one so that you can make older posts pop up at the top as if they were new. This basically tells all your friends at the search engines that your site needs to be pinged regularly rather than it just sitting there. It also pings all the ones you list in your ping page when it rotates a post.

There is something you will need to do however if you want to use this plugin as it relates to your permalink structure. If you use a time based structure like this blog does it is sort of an issue to use this plugin as it will change the url of the post every time a post is shifted. The only structure that will work, and not not change your link structure every time is to use the Custom section and to put only /%postname%/ as your structure. Otherwise it will change the url every time it comes up and anyone that has ever linked to you will show a dead link when it is clicked on to your blog posts. We don’t want that!

To find this on your WP dashboard go to Options>Permalinks. Then select the “Custom” option and put /%postname%/ in there for your permalink structure. Then all your posts will just be either what you put in as your post slug, or the title of your post.

Configuring Scheduled Post Shift Plugin:

As for the plugin, it is very easy to set up, but there are 2 pre-activation things you should work on.

1. Change your permalink structure as indicated above so that your posts keep the same url at all times.

2. For every post that you want to rotate on a regular basis they will need to have the SAME category. The reason for this is that the plugin works on a category basis. It will only rotate based upon a specified category, so if you have any posts that you want rotated you must have them listed under the same category. I used Agloco as my standard category for all posts on my Agloco site so it looks alright. There are hidden category plugins out there as well that you may want to search for, but I haven’t done this myself as I wonder as to whether it will be considered as black hat SEO :).

the easiest way to change categories on mass posts for me was to add the plugin WP-Cats to your directory. This plugin allows you to use an A-jaxy way to change categories right on your mangae posts screen instead of having to go into each post and edit the categories individually. Very useful anyways, but especially useful for this.

As for configuring the plugin follow these easy steps:

1. This file is sort of different from most, but you should be able to figure it out right enough. Right-click on this file and “Save Link As”. You must do it this way or it will open up and just show you the code. Once it is saved rename the file from a .txt file to a .php file.

2. Upload it to your Plugins directory and enable it in your dashboard.

3. In your WP dashboard select Manage>Categories. Look for the category you used for these posts and on the far left you will see a number for the category ID. Remember that.

4. Got to your WP dashboard and select Options>DDPostShift. In this area you will need to insert the amount of time you would like between post shifts and then enter the category ID that you just found into the other box. This will ensure that for whatever amount of time you entered, the oldest post in that category will be pushed to the front page of your blog when the time is up.

5. Click on “Enable Post Shift” and it is ready to roll.

Pretty useful for this type of thing, eh? Of course this isn’t useful for every site out there, but if you are using a blog to create a place for affiliate marketing, timeless info about anything, and just need it to appear as if it is updating regularly, this plugin will do the trick.

Take a look at other useful Wordpress Plugins I use on various websites.