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Ideas for Wordpress Time Control Plugin wpSLEEP

October 10, 2008 in wordpress

Wordpress is a powerful bloging tool shifting over to compete with strong content-management-systems. One feature is to create drafts of posts and to schedule the publishing process of your content. Imagine there is a plugin which adds the same possibility to everything you like and will save your time. Imagine what you can do with it, do you?

wpsleep-flickr Ideas for Wordpress Time Control Plugin wpSLEEP

Creative Commons License photo credit: Luís Vieira, edited by Knowtebook

How does the plugin work?

wpSLEEP enables you to schedule everything on your site by just writing the following tags around your content in combination with the date or time:


[wpsleep startdate enddate] ... [/wpsleep]

Follow the examples to learn more about the usage and the possibilities.

Ad Management

I recently got a request for an ad on Knowtebook. The advertiser wanted to book a whole year and pay in advance. Awesome I thought, but wait… how would I would I keep on track as other advertiser will come and it will be more complex? There was a time for an ad management tool, but most of them didnt fit for me. I started to make a simple Excel sheet, but were not happy with it as well. With this plugin you can easily define start and end times for your ads and insert it around you text or image links. After one year it will automatically be removed from your site.

Example

The advertisement is booked from the 1st of january for the whole year and it will be removed right at midnight without any doings. Pleace notice that the plugin is written in german and thus the dates are written in that way.


[wpsleep start="01.01.2008 09:00" end="31.01.2008 00:00"]
ADVERTISEMENT
[/wpsleep]

Now imagine you have a request for a new advertisement starting on the 1st of january. You can either go into office on your holidays or use wpSLEEP. The following ad has a future date and thus not visible until the new year.


[wpsleep start="01.01.2009 00:00"]
NEW ADVERTISEMENT
[/wpsleep]

So in the end you have easily replaced automatically your ad without any big efforts and can concentrate on new work.

Time related contests

During the olympic games this year a client wanted to make a special contest. The deadline for joining was at sunday night on 0 o’clock. Uff… actually I wanted to take the weekend off and travel a bit around. Now I had to make an entry in my calendar and stay up untill midnight. Nice! The other way was to search for a php solution and make some if clauses combined with date functions. With wpSLEEP it all is so much easier. Just enter the time schedule and go to bed ;)

Example

Here is the example for my story. The contest was planned only in july. wpSLEEP did everything and I could take the weekend off. So could you the next time.


[wpsleep start="01.07.2008 00:00" end="31.07.2008 00:00"]
ADVERTISEMENT
[/wpsleep]

Personalize

Maybe you love to surprise somebeody else or to get surprised. Think of the birthday of your clients or blog members. Making a special (maybe with a free gift or download) can make a large impact to your users.

More Ideas?

I have added ideas I had in mind, but it would also be great to get some feedback and listen to your ideas.

If you have enjoyed this post, you may want to subscribe to Knowtebook for free and get new ideas at first or take a look at our other wordpress posts.

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Chris
Oct 10, 2008
No: 5 / ID: 2832

Hooking it into a calendar would be awesome. Also, enabling it to hook with google calendar would be a bonus.


Knowtebook
Oct 10, 2008
No: 4 / ID: 2830

This is a really good idea. Using repeating time tags like “everyday”, “every week”, “every year” and so on would be great and reduce lots of work.

One even could make a simple event calender out of it. Each event will get shown until they are past. So only the upcomings events will stay on the top of the event list. Mohaaa!


Chris
Oct 10, 2008
No: 3 / ID: 2829

This is a very simple and interesting plugin. Would it be possible to make the date/timestamp dynamic instead of hard coding it? I think this would open up even more possibilities.

Say, for example, you were able to set an object to appear only on certain times of day, every day. I’ve always thought it would be cool to change the appearance of a website based on the time of day in the user’s own timezone.

Also, you could apply the same principle to geolocation. Call it wpGEO. This plugin word work the same way as wpSLEEP, only it would show and hide things based on the uers geographic location. Combine the two and you’ve got yourself a pretty cool set of plugins!

Cheers,

Chris
cardgazer.com


Sergej Müller
Oct 10, 2008
No: 2 / ID: 2828

Thanks for Post!

New Format in Plugin Version 0.3: [wpsleep start="09:00" end="11:30"]My Ad[/wpsleep]

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Oct 13, 2008
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