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Featured Listing Expiry

Featured listings now expire automatically after a configurable duration. The previous behavior - “once Featured, always Featured” - made it hard to sell Featured as a paid SKU. Auto-expiry sets up Featured as a real time-bound boost.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

When a job is marked Featured (manually by an admin, or via the Featured-upgrade credit consumer in Pro), the plugin records the expiry timestamp on the job.

A daily cron event (wcb_expire_featured_jobs) runs every 24 hours, finds jobs whose featured-expiry timestamp is in the past, and clears the _wcb_featured flag on each. The job stays published - only its Featured boost ends.

Configuration

Section titled “Configuration”

Navigate to Career Board → Settings → Job Listings, find the Featured Duration (days) field. Set the number of days a Featured boost lasts after activation.

Default: 30 days. The value is clamped to the 1-365 range, so the minimum boost is one day - there is no 0 setting for permanent Featured status. If you need a Featured listing to persist longer, set a larger value (up to 365) or re-feature the job after it expires.

Cron schedule

Section titled “Cron schedule”

The cleanup cron runs daily, registered as wcb_expire_featured_jobs. WordPress’s wp-cron triggers it on the next page load after the scheduled time - for low-traffic sites, install a real cron job that hits wp-cron.php to keep timing accurate.

If you ever need to manually trigger expiry:

Terminal window
wp cron event run wcb_expire_featured_jobs

Per-job override

Section titled “Per-job override”

Site admins can extend a specific job’s Featured duration via the job’s edit screen, Featured meta box. Changing the value updates the per-job expiry without affecting other jobs.

With Pro: pay-to-renew

Section titled “With Pro: pay-to-renew”

Pro’s Featured-upgrade credit consumer lets the same job pay for Featured status more than once over its life. After auto-expiry, the employer can spend more credits to re-feature.

What stays the same

Section titled “What stays the same”
  • Already-featured jobs at upgrade time get a default expiry of now + 30 days (or whatever the site default is at upgrade time). They’re not back-dated.
  • The wcb_featured taxonomy / query parameter still works identically - only the _wcb_featured postmeta gets cleared on expiry.
  • Templates that filter on Featured (is_featured block attribute, REST ?featured=true) automatically respect expired status with no template changes.