date-based content in a block? (question & suggestion to add to your theme)

I would like to have a block on the front page, where I can put date-based content, say about specific historical events.

Ideally, I’d like to have a special post category (say, “chronology”). Those posts will be excluded from other areas of front page blocks (not sure if the “Exclude custom field” would do it, I will have a look to see how it works, I am new to the theme).

However, those posts will have an additional feature of a specific day that they are related to (say, “20th Oct” – optionally, this may include the year). Let’s call that “chronology-date”.

Now, in the suggested new block, the filter will check the chronology-date and will present the latest post (or as per the “limit post number” that is used now) for that category “chronology” only.

There would a variable of how many days before or after the chronology-date, they would become eligible, say, “chronology-before=5” (days) and “chronology-after=1” (day).

This could serve multiple purposes, i.e. historical events, future events, diary events, public announcements, etc.

Q1: is there a way of doing this at the moment, perhaps using any kind of custom fields?

Q2: from some research I’ve done, I didn’t find any wordpress plugin that does the job. Would you be interested in building that and adding it to the theme? I think it’s relatively easy to code the “chronology-date” as a new field for all posts, which would enable that.

Andreas.

Well, in my case, I need to find a way to do this very soon on my website, but I think the whole wordpress community would appreciate such a functionality.

Thanks a lot for the response. I will try your suggestions for as much as I can do myself. Really appreciated.