[CMS] Looking for a "timed content" module

[Angel Blue01]

I'm looking for a feature for a CMS.

I'm working with a client, a local church, to redo their Web site from static XHTML to something more modern and easy to maintain.

As I've talked with the staff members who have some stake in the Web site its become obvious that they need a CMS, they are not technically oriented and do not have anyone readily available to maintain the site anymore, so they need a simple way of updating the site themselves. I am just there for this project with no prospect of staying on.

I've never worked with a CMS before, I've done other Web sites using hand-coded HTML and PHP. I've restricted my search for a CMS to 3: Drupal, WordPress and Joomla! I've spent a few days each with Drupal and WordPress running of my local machine. I'm very impressed with Drupal for its extendability and WordPress for simplicity.

They have a need that to me seems rather basic but I cannot find in either of those CMSs so far, what I'm calling "timed content", a simple way of displaying content on a schedule, with an optional "coming soon" message beforehand and a "The event/relevance has passed" afterward without needing a database. This features allows the queuing of content with known deadlines months ahead of time, as well as not displaying the content after it is no longer relevant. I am the Webmaster for another church's site, and have implemented this features for them using a simple PHP function with ifs.

Most of the pages on the site consist of static content with the exception of a few sections on many pages where this concept would be helpful.

I've searched Drupal's modules and spent hours Googling for an equivalent for WordPress. I have found modules/extensions that allow for a post to appear on a schedule, but no any way of having the same content cease being displayed on a schedule, displaying it on an existing static page, or the before and after messages.

I haven?t looked into Joomla! yet, but it seems to fall between Drupal and WordPress on extendability vs. simplicity so perhaps it will have an extension that provides this functionality.

This is the only missing feature for this project that I have not found some way of implementing via either of the CMSs I've looked at so far; if one CMS supports this feature and the others do not, I will go with the CMS that does support it.

Thanks!

[threetonesun]

If you can do it with PHP, you can do it with Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla!

I don't see why you wouldn't use a database, considering you already have one for any of these CMSs. With Wordpress you can assign posts to dates in the future, then just do a simple date check on a loop to ensure only things from the future appear.

[primexx]

Not sure about cease displaying but you can definitely schedule posts in WordPress (and I'm pretty sure all the rest too) by changing the publish date of a post into the future. WordPress is the most user-friendly for newcomers btw.

[threetonesun]

For reference, in Wordpress something like:

// Create a new filtering function that will add our where clause to the query
function filter_where( $where = '' ) {
// posts in the last 30 days
$where .= " AND post_date > '" . date('Y-m-d', strtotime('+30 days')) . "'";
return $where;
}
add_filter( 'posts_where', 'filter_where' );
$query = new WP_Query( $query_string );
remove_filter( 'posts_where', 'filter_where' );
[/CODE]

Will give you posts from today to 30 days in the future.

[desired display name]

You can set post dates in Joomla! as well. Dunno about the "upcoming.." feature though, but it has got to be an extension for that.

I prefer Joomla! over Wordpress and Drupal for multiple reasons, but two differences is that Worpress is pretty basic and Drupal way too advanced for my projects. Joomla! seems to be a perfect fit for most of my projects. Tiny projects, but still.

*edit* about the "Upcoming" feature, can't you (or someone) create one Article/page (or whatever it's called in whichever cms), set it to publish on a specific date and create an event in Google Calendar (or any other calendar app) (http://extensions.jo...ts-calendars/95 perhaps? first bing) with the same date? Perhaps youre looking for something automated. In that case, it has to be an extension for one of the CMSs