Redirect an Expired Page

Question

For some reason i can't figure this one out. We have deals on our site that are set to expire on certain dates. These deals are sent out via email, so someone could click on a link after the deal has expired. If this happens, we would like to redirect them to the main deals page. My thought was to do this one of two ways:

1. If the entry is "closed" redirect to {segment_2}. The problem is that expired entries don't automatically change to "closed" status. How would i do this?

2. Use a conditional statement to either show page or redirect based on expiration date.. something like this:

   {exp:channel:entries
       status="open|featured|homepage|hidden"
       dynamic="no"
       limit="1"
       disable="member_data|trackbacks|categories"}
   
       {if expiration_date < current_time}
           SHOW DEAL
       {/if}
   
       {if expiration_date > current_time}
           REDIRECT TO {segment_2} 
       {/if}
   {/exp:channel:entries}
   

This isn't working either. I did a test with it to just show text based on the condition and both expired pages and live pages showed "SHOW DEAL". Obviously missing something here.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, what happens when you output

Expires - {expiration_date} 

Current Time - {current_time}

Does that output look like two values you can use comparisons with? You could use Low Nice Date to convert times and dates (I think, check the docs), or perhaps have you looked at this addon?

https://devot-ee.com/add-ons/auto-expire

It looks out of date, but might work still. Test it on a dev site first. And also look around devot-ee, there might be a newer version or one by a different author.

Answer 2

Well, I think your conditional is inverted. Shouldn't it be?

{if expiration_date < current_time}
   {redirect='{segment_2}'}
{/if}

I can't test on an older version of eecms, but maybe the one you're using doesn't save the expiration_date as UNIX timestamp. In this case, try:

{if "{expiration_date format='%Y%m%d'}" < "{current_time format='%Y%m%d'}"}
   {redirect='{segment_2}'}
{/if}

Answer 3

The conditional was correct the whole time. I was missing the show_expired="yes" in the {exp:channel:entries. What was happening was that entry wasn't pulling at all so the conditional wasn't seeing anything. Once i added the show_expired it was able to see the expiration date to compare to. Thanks guys!