Attract Readers Coming Back With Upcoming Posts

I always think about how to increase number loyalty readers and how to convert one-time visitors into subscribers. In this post, I’d like to review Upcoming Posts which will create a widget which shows all of your scheduled posts to notice your readers for coming back some time in the future.

As a blogger, I always like to plan what are the topics I’m going to publish at least a few days in advanced. With the use of Upcoming Posts, I am equipped with the ability to show the excerpt of future posts in my blog. It will help to convert or increase your readership if they’re interested in future topics or posts.

Features

1. Help you to show scheduled posts or drafts in the sidebar.
2. Ability to configure the number of posts to be shown
3. Ability to show the excerpt, time, category of a future post or draft.
4. Make your own style by editing ucp.css and ucp_widget.php files.

It’s a light weight plugin. It has no settings or options page. All the configurations are done inside the widget. After you add the widget to your sidebar, you can configure a number of things.

1. Title – The title of the widget which will be shown to the readers.
2. Number of post to show – Usually I will put 5. You can increase the number if you’ve more posts to show.
3. If no post – The widget will show this text if there is no future post or draft to be shown.
4. Time format – It allows you to configure the date and time format like you want to show day first or month first. But when you add the widget in the very first time, this field is blank which I feel it is inconvenient for those who don’t know the syntax of the format.
5. Show Timestamp – An option for you to choose whether to show the date and time of a future/draft post.
6. Show Category – An option for you to choose whether to show the category of a future/draft post.
7. Show Excerpt – Allow you to configure if the excerpt of a post is going to be shown. Personally I think we can check this box as readers will base on this information to judge if they’re interested in the future post.
8. Switch to Drafted Posts – If you want to show draft posts instead of scheduled posts, you can check this box. I think this is not much useful as draft post might not be the post you’ll publish. Draft post may just serves as a note for you.

As you can see the result of the upcoming posts in the sidebar, the styling is quite ugly. I’m using Thesis theme to test this plugin. I think the CSS will work for some themes but not all.

Things To Be Improved

There is the additional suggestions for the plugin and summary of the things to be improved as mentioned above.

1. It should have some examples to teach user how to configure the time format.
2. It should have more options for us to exclude some of the draft posts or scheduled posts to be shown.
3. It will be better if it can show the upcoming posts above the content section in the index page or at the top/bottom of the content page.
4. It should improve the CSS as the default one is quite ugly for some themes.

Conclusion

The idea of Upcoming Posts WordPress plugin is good but somehow I think it need more works to give it more options and flexibility.

Upcoming Posts Plugin Homepage
Download Upcoming Posts

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