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manifest / content / content-freshness-reminder

Content Freshness Reminder

Flags pages and posts that haven't been touched in 6+ months and nudges site owners to keep their content fresh.

by Farhan Ali · github.com/farhanali-developer/content-freshness-reminder · website

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Install

No release zip yet. The repository archive installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow:

wp plugin install https://github.com/farhanali-developer/content-freshness-reminder/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
Readme github.com/farhanali-developer/content-freshness-reminder ↗

A lightweight WordPress plugin that flags pages and posts nobody has touched in 6+ months and nudges the owner to update them.

Every agency knows this problem: a client site launches, looks great, and then the About page quietly goes years without an update. Content Freshness Reminder catches that before it becomes embarrassing.

Features

  • Dashboard widget — lists stale pages/posts with a direct edit link and "hasn't been updated since March 2025" style messaging
  • Dismissible admin notice — a heads-up on the WordPress Dashboard when stale content is found, dismissible for a week at a time
  • Freshness column — a Fresh/Stale badge added to the Posts and Pages list screens, alongside the last-modified date
  • Weekly email digest — optional summary emailed to the site admin every week
  • Configurable threshold — default is 6 months, adjustable from 1–60
  • Post type selection — monitor any public post type, not just posts and pages
  • Zero external dependencies, no tracking, no bloat — reads post_modified dates and nothing else

Requirements

  • WordPress 5.8+
  • PHP 7.2+

Installation

From WordPress.org

Search for "Content Freshness Reminder" in Plugins → Add New, install, and activate.

Manual / from source

git clone https://github.com/farhanali-developer/content-freshness-reminder.git

Copy (or symlink) the content-freshness-reminder folder into wp-content/plugins/, then activate it from Plugins → Installed Plugins.

Usage

After activating, go to Settings → Content Freshness to set the staleness threshold and choose which post types to monitor.

Stale content shows up in two places automatically:

  • A Content Freshness widget on the WordPress Dashboard, listing the oldest content first
  • A Freshness column on the Posts and Pages list tables, with a Fresh/Stale badge next to the last-modified date

If a dismissible notice appears on the Dashboard, dismissing it snoozes it for that user for a week — it reappears if stale content is still there after that.

Email digest

Enable "Weekly email digest" on the settings page to have a summary of stale content emailed to the site's admin address once a week, via a weekly WP-Cron schedule the plugin registers.

The digest is sent through WordPress's built-in wp_mail() — the plugin doesn't configure SMTP itself, so delivery depends on your site's mail setup. If digest emails aren't arriving (common on hosts that block PHP's default mail()), install an SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP to route mail through a real provider.

License

GPLv2 or later — see LICENSE.txt or https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html