Herodotus – On This Day

Herodotus is a specialized tool for creating recurring historical events based on Day and Month, making it perfect for « This Day in History », birthdays, anniversaries, or any annual recurring timeline.

Unlike the default WordPress behavior where posts are tied to a specific publication year, Herodotus introduces its own herodotus_post Custom Post Type. You simply pick a day and a month from the custom date picker in the block editor, and your post will automatically appear on that exact day every single year.

Key Features:

• Dedicated Custom Post Type — keeps your regular blog posts completely separate from historical events.
• Custom Taxonomy — group historical events into categories like « Science », « Politics », « Birthdays », etc.
• Annual Recursion — just set « May 15 » and the post appears every May 15, forever.
• Two Layouts — standard list layout for pages, compact layout ideal for sidebars and widgets.
• Shortcode & Gutenberg Block — use [herodotus] or the included block to display events anywhere.
• Year Support — set the year of the event for display purposes.
• Year Badge — the historical year is displayed as a badge on each event card, so visitors immediately see when the event occurred.
• Category Filtering — display posts from a specific category using [herodotus category="history"].
• Category Labels — category is displayed on each event card and on the single event page.
• Hide Images — show posts as text-only using [herodotus show_image="false"].
• Open Graph & Twitter Card — automatic meta tags for beautiful social media sharing previews.
• Schema.org Markup — JSON-LD structured data (Article, Event, CollectionPage) for better SEO and Google rich results. Automatically disabled if Yoast SEO, RankMath, AIOSEO or The SEO Framework is active.
• Timezone Aware — strictly respects your WordPress timezone settings.
• WPML & Polylang Ready — includes wpml-config.xml for full multilingual compatibility.
• Translation Ready — includes translations for Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Turkish.
• Caching — built-in transient caching for fast frontend performance.
• Sortable Admin Columns — the posts list in the admin shows « Herodotus Date » and « Year » columns, both clickable to sort your events by date or year.

Available Shortcode Attributes:

• [herodotus] — show today’s posts using global settings.
• [herodotus layout="compact"] — compact view, ideal for sidebars.
• [herodotus limit="5"] — limit to first 5 posts.
• [herodotus category="history"] — show posts from a specific category (use slug).
• [herodotus excerpt_words="15"] — set custom excerpt length.
• [herodotus show_image="false"] — hide images, show only title, excerpt and Read more.
• [herodotus order="DESC"] — reverse sort order for this instance (overrides the global setting).