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).