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.

Herodotus Pro

An optional paid add-on that builds on this plugin – it does not replace it. Pro adds grid, carousel and timeline layouts, upcoming events that appear before their date and count down to it, a source field with citation markup, a location field with coordinates, CSV import for a whole archive at once, multiple categories and tags with exclusion, priority events, and a REST API endpoint. There is a 7-day free trial without a credit card.

Learn more about Herodotus Pro

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.
• Three Layouts – standard list layout for pages, compact layout for sidebars and widgets, and a plain text layout with no images at all.
• 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.
• BC/AD Era Support – mark events as BC or AD. BC events are sorted chronologically before AD events. The “AD” label is shown in the year badge when selected.
• 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.
• Quick Edit – change the day, month, year and era straight from the posts list, without opening the editor.
• RSS Feed – /herodotus/feed/ delivers today’s events, refreshed every day. Works with RSS readers and automation services.

Available Shortcode Attributes:

• [herodotus] – show today’s posts using global settings.
• [herodotus layout="compact"] – compact view, ideal for sidebars.
• [herodotus layout="text"] – plain text list: no images, no card borders.
• [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).
• [herodotus_random] – show a random pick out of today’s events. Accepts limit, category, layout, excerpt_words and show_image.