What We Were Writing helps editors prepare a collection of historical posts for a specific calendar date.

Choose a future display date in the WordPress administration area. The plugin finds published posts from the same day and month in earlier years. Select the required posts and save the collection.

On the scheduled date, the [what_we_were_writing] shortcode displays a simple server-rendered HTML list grouped by year. When no collection exists for the current date, the shortcode returns no output.

Features:

Manual selection of posts for any display date.
Automatic search by matching day and month in previous years.
Several posts from one year or from different years.
Simple server-rendered output without JavaScript or animations.
No external services, tracking, or third-party libraries.
Multisite-compatible database installation and removal.

The plugin stores only the display date and a JSON list of selected post IDs in its own database table.

Shortcode

Basic usage:

[what_we_were_writing]

Optional attribute:

title changes the section heading.

Example:

[what_we_were_writing title="Our history"]