Descripción

Time Machine is a simple plugin that grab N published articles from database (posts and/or pages) published on current day and/or offset of time in past years, and list them in widget or block.
User can set widget title, number of displayed articles and message shown when there is no public articles in past.

Features

Shortcode, legacy widget, block-based widget and Gutenberg block, all with the same options
Set the number of articles to list
Set a custom message for days with no articles in the past, or hide the whole list when there is nothing to show
Include or exclude pages, and optionally exclude articles from the current year
Set offset and offset direction (before, after or both) with a time range in days, weeks or months
Optionally show an excerpt with a custom length; it is generated from post content when there is no manual excerpt
Optionally show the number of comments
Lists only published articles (drafts are never included)
Password protected articles are excluded unless you explicitly enable them; when included, the manual excerpt is used if there is one, otherwise no excerpt is generated from the content until the visitor unlocks the article (same as WordPress core)
Works with full page cache plugins: the list is refreshed after page load through a small REST endpoint (can be disabled with a constant in wp-config.php)
Site Health check warns you if a REST API restriction blocks that refresh, and tells you how to fix it
Cached queries that are cleared automatically whenever a post or page is saved
Clean, semantic HTML5 markup that validates without errors, styled by your theme’s CSS

Capturas

Bloques

Este plugin proporciona 1 bloque.

Time Machine List articles published in the past, relative to today, by a configurable time offset.

Instalación

Manual

Upload the entire time-machine folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
Insert new Time Machine widget on Appearance Widgets.
Configure Time Machine options.

Automatic

Go to Plugins Add New and search for time machine.
Click on Install Now link bellow Time Machine search result and aswer Yes on popup question.
If you need enter FTP parameters for your host and click on Proceed.
Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
Insert new Time Machine widget on Appearance Widgets.
Configure Time Machine options.

Preguntas frecuentes

Why name Time Machine?

I like effect that produce Time Machine – traveling trough time. This plugin does exactly that, but with fixed month and day constant.

How I can help?

Revire and rate plugin, submit suggestions, contribute on WordPress forum.

Does Time Machine work with full page cache plugins (WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache…)?

Yes. Time Machine’s list is refetched from a small REST endpoint right after the page finishes loading, so the visible content stays current even when the whole page has been cached for longer than a day. The cached markup already on the page stays visible until (and unless) that request succeeds, so nothing is ever blank while it refreshes, and the page cache itself is never touched or purged. If you prefer to disable this and rely only on the page cache’s own expiry, add define( 'TIME_MACHINE_DISABLE_REFRESH', true ); to wp-config.php.

How do I turn the front end auto-refresh off?

Add this to wp-config.php:

define( 'TIME_MACHINE_DISABLE_REFRESH', true );

No data-time-machine-* attributes are printed after that, the refresh script is never enqueued, and no REST request is ever made. Lists render once, on the server. On a page held in a full page cache for longer than a day, the list can then be a day or more behind.

The browser console shows a 401 on `/wp-json/time-machine/v1/list`. What is wrong?

A security plugin or snippet on your site closes the whole REST API to signed out visitors, through the rest_authentication_errors filter. That filter runs before any route can state that it is public, so Time Machine cannot exempt its own route from it, however read only that route is.

Nothing is broken for your visitors. The list is rendered on the server and stays on screen; only the refresh described above is skipped, and the failed request is logged in the console. Time Machine checks this once a day and tells you in Tools -> Site Health, which spells out the two options below.

Option 1: switch the refresh off. Add this to wp-config.php:

define( 'TIME_MACHINE_DISABLE_REFRESH', true );

No request is made after that, so the console stays clean. Lists render once, on the server, exactly as they did before this feature existed. On a page held in a full page cache for longer than a day, the list can then be a day or more behind.

Option 2: let this one route through. It is read only and returns the same published titles, excerpts and links the page already shows to the same visitor, so letting it through gives nothing away. Add this to a must-use plugin or to your theme’s functions.php:

add_filter(
    'rest_authentication_errors',
    function ( $result ) {

        if ( ! is_wp_error( $result ) ) {
            return $result;
        }

        $route = isset( $GLOBALS['wp']->query_vars['rest_route'] )
            ? ltrim( $GLOBALS['wp']->query_vars['rest_route'], '/' )
            : '';

        if ( 0 === strpos( $route, 'time-machine/v1/' ) ) {
            return null;
        }

        return $result;
    },
    99
);

It runs after the restriction and before the core cookie check, and clears the error for the time-machine/v1 namespace only. Every other route keeps the restriction exactly as it is.

Reseñas

Marko6548 3 de septiembre de 2016

Thank you, Great and Useful Plugin

Leer todas las 2 reseñas

Colaboradores y desarrolladores

Este software es de código abierto. Las siguientes personas han contribuido a este plugin.

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Registro de cambios

26.9.0 (2026-09-19)

Test: WordPress 7.1
Refactor: Full plugin refactored
Add: Support for Block Editor (FSE Widget and Gutenberg Block)
Add: Excerpt is now generated from post content when no manual excerpt is set, same fallback WordPress core uses for the_excerpt()
Add: Password protected posts with no manual excerpt show a notice instead of a generated excerpt, until the current visitor unlocks that post
Add: Front-end auto-refresh of the post list via a REST endpoint, so pages served from a full page cache plugin still show current content
Add: Daily check of whether a site wide REST API restriction blocks the front-end refresh route, reported in a dismissible admin notice and in a Site Health test, with the snippet needed to allow that one read only route
Add: TIME_MACHINE_DISABLE_REFRESH constant to switch the front-end refresh off site wide from wp-config.php
Change: Remove hours offset
Change: Rename rangetype -> direction and rangenum -> offset
Change: Remove Excerpt before/after HTML tags and wrap excerpt into span with class excerpt
Change: Offset query results are now sorted newest year first
Improve: Offset query now compares whole days instead of the exact time, and results are cached (object cache, or transient when no persistent object cache is active)
Improve: Offset query loop now starts from the oldest published post’s year (cached for a month) instead of a hardcoded 2002
Improve: Cache is invalidated automatically whenever a post or page is saved, instead of only relying on the daily/monthly expiration
Improve: Front-end script is enqueued minified, and served as readable source only while SCRIPT_DEBUG is on

0.4.1 (2014-12-20)

Improve: multi instance widget
Improve: rewritten to OOP and optimized code
Add: rel=”nofollow” to post links, to prevent reindexing old posts and and affect page rank
Add: uninstall procedure to remove widget settings
Test on WordPress 4.1

0.0.6 (2011-04-02)

Fixed timezone bug. Now Time Machine instead of GMT use WordPres timezone for time offset calculations.

0.0.5.5svn (2009-08-03)

Added option to display excerpt, with feature to short and insert XHTML code before and after excerpt
Added date offset (+/- N hours/days/weeks/months)
Added offset type (before to current date, before to after current date, current date to after)

0.0.5.4 (2009-07-13)

fixed bug for feature added in 0.0.5.3 (reported by Rarst)
Added Belorussian language (submited by Marcis Gasuns)

0.0.5.3 (2009-07-12)

Added option do hide widget if there is no posts in past (sugessted by Rarst)
Added Simplified Chinese language (submited by Leslie Yeh)
Updated Serbian and Italian language
Fixed post links if blog is not in root with permalink (thanks Leslie)

0.0.5.2 (2009-06-19)

Added Italian localisation (submited by Caporale Reyes)

0.0.5.1 (2009-03-08)

Fixed broken 0.0.5 (‘Number of posts’ above links)

0.0.5 (2009-03-08)

compare GMT date, not local date on host
added description to displayed number of comments

0.0.4 (2009-02-28)

Added option to display number of comments

0.0.3 (2009-02-14)

Fixed links to articles when is active non-Home pages
Added option to exclude WordPress Pages from listing
Added option to exclude articles published in current year from listing
Updated Serbian translation

0.0.2 (2009-02-14)

Fixed SQL query to work as expected
Added option to display password protected posts in list

0.0.1 (2009-02-13)

Initial release