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The original version of autoarchive was written by (C) 2005 Tudor Ilisoi - copyright (C) TeachmeJoomla August 2006 for Joomla 1.0.x. This version has been rewritten to work on Joomla 1.5.x.

This is a content plugin. It runs when your Joomla site displays content items in frontend when visited by visitors or robots. It runs automatically. This plugin is designed for Joomla! based sites such as news sites or any site that posts a large amount of articles . AutoArchive2 allows your site to automatically archive, trash, delete, or move articles based on article expiration date. It can remove expired articles from your frontpage manager and can send email to article authors and/or administrators informing them of the actions taken.

Behavior:

The plugin is called when a visitor (or a Web crawler) accesses a content item. At that point, the plugin scans the Joomla database content table to check if some items have expired. If so, an automatic action is performed. Those actions include the following:

• Move to archive
• Move to trash
• Delete permanently(undo is not possible)
• Move to archive and to Section/Category (as of 9/3/2009 version)
• Move to Section/Category and Re-publish (as of 9/3/2009 version)

The plugin design takes site performance into account. This is why you can set both how many items may be processed at a time, and how much time should pass before two consecutive executions.

You may set a section and category filter if you want automatic processing to be restricted to specific containers. You may also reset the front page flag (as of 10/27/2009 version).

If you have many expired items:

For example, you have a 10,000 articles site, and 8,000 of those expired. You need to move the articles to archive and notify article authors that an action is being taken. We also assume you have one visitor per hour on your site. So what you need is a simple calculation in order to adjust those parameters correctly.

24hours * 1 visit * 1 item = 24 items processed per day.
8,000 articles / 24 articles per day = 333 days. So, it will take approximately 333 days (almost 1 year!) to auto-archive your items.

The problem in this example is the small number of visits. If you want the job done in one month, just setto 10. This will make the plugin finish in 1 month, but sending 10 notification emails each time a visitor hits a content item may slow the site down. You should tune the plugin again after the articles are processed.

Calculating normal operation parameters:

High traffic scenario

Let's assume for this example that 10 articles on your Joomla! site expire every day. You want those processed automatically. Your site has 1,000 page views per day. How do you set the autoarchive2 plugin for best performance (minimal impact for site speed).

Well, set theto 1, since your pageviews are greater than the number of content items that need processing. Now, how large should be the polling cycle interval? We don't want the plugin scanning the site uselessly if all of your ten articles have already been processed.

Well, 1,000 page views means 1,000 plugin executions per day. We only need ten executions, since our site has an average of ten expiring articles a day.

24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds = 86,400 seconds in a day. We need 86,400 seconds / 10 articles = one execution every 8,640 seconds. So, you set how many to 1, and polling cycle to 8,640. This ensures the plugin will process ten articles a day with great performance. An alternative is setting How many to 2, and doubling the polling cycle.

Low traffic scenario:

Another example. Your large site has 100 expiring articles daily. Unfortunately, it gets only 10 page views per day.
You want those articles processed automatically. In this case, you should process more items per page view, because page views are fewer than expiring articles. So, setto 10, that will make 10 * 10 = 100.

Update 09/03/2009 Version 2.0.1 Available:

* This version adds the ability to republish previously unpublished or expired articles and either set a user controlled next unpublished date X days in the future or set no unpublished date. This feature is tied to moving the article to a new section/category.

* Also available in this version is the ability move an article to the archive and at the same time move it to a new section/category.

* Optional features let you determine if the plugin will work on unpublished articles and/or on uncategorized articles.

Update 10/27/2009 Version 2.0.2 Available:

* This version adds the capability of resetting the frontpage flag for an article moved to the archive.

* This version also corrects a bug introduced in 2.0.1 with the uncategorized articles preventing the category and/or the section filter from working correctly.

Update 12/10/2009 Version 2.0.3 Available:

* This version corrects an incompatibility with PHP 5.3.

* This version also adds a language file to facilitate translation efforts.