Creating a new Page of Posts in Wordpress - php

Question

I am currently trying to make a e-zine using wordpress, and have most of it done. The homepage displays a list of the "pieces" which are included in that edition of the e-zine. I would like to make it so that, when an edition expires (currently using Post Expirator plugin), a new page is created automatically resembling the front page in showing the index of that particular (now expired) edition.
I'm not very experienced using PHP, and still a newbie at wordpress. How could I accomplish this?

Answer 1

The idea is this, you just have to get the expiration date and make a condition with it. You just need to have a basic php skills in order for you to do it. Heres the logic
if($curdate > $expiration_date){ //you can change the condition into ">=" if you want to create a post on and after expiration date
//sample wordpress wp_insert_post
$my_post = array(
'post_title' => 'My post',
'post_content' => 'This is my post.',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'post_author' => 1,
'post_category' => array(8,39)
);
// Insert the post into the database
wp_insert_post( $my_post );
}
for more info visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_insert_post

Answer 2

Here is what I ended up doing, using the suggestions of Felipe as a starting point. There might be a less convulted way of doing this, but, as I said, I'm just a beginner, so this is what I came up with:
First, I created a volnum variable, which keeps track of the current volume number. Then, I cache the front page so that later I can save it as an independent html document:
This is at the beginning of the index.php, before the get_header().
<?php $volnum; ?>
<?php ob_start(); ?>
In the front page, I have an editorial and, next to it, I have the content index. I am saving the editorial tag's (which is always "voln" where 'n' is the volume number) volume number (maybe the foreach is not necessary since the editorial only has one tag) :
<?php $tags = get_the_tags();
foreach ($tags as $tag){
$volnum = $tag->name;
}
?>
Finally, at the end of the document, after the last html, I have added the following code:
<?php
$handle = opendir("past_vol/");
$numOfFiles = count($handle);
$volExists = false;
for($i=0;$i<=$numOfFiles;$i++){
$name = readdir($handle);
if($volnum.".html" == ($name)){
$volExists = true;
continue;
}
}
if($volExists == false){
$cachefile = "past_vol/".$volnum.".html";
$fp = fopen($cachefile, 'w');
fwrite($fp, ob_get_contents());
fclose($fp);
}
closedir($handle);
ob_end_flush();
?>
"past_vol" is the directory where I am saving the past volume html files. So the directory is opened, the amount of files is counted, and a loop that goes through each file's name is started. If a file with the same name as $volnum, then $volExists is true. If at the end of the loop $volExists is false, then it saves the cached page.
Again, it could probably be optimized a whole lot, but for now this works!