This has been Partially Implemented and will be available for use starting with Showcase 2.6.0 Beta 1
This is
EXPERIMENTAL, so keep that in mind. This may change, may get tweaked, may get totally blown away.
This is a
FILTER. To FILTER something means to narrow down a large result set into a smaller result set. Do NOT confuse filters with SORT ORDERING. Filters and Sort Ordering work together.
So what are Date Filters? Date Filters allow you to narrow down the results set by the amount of days since a Showcase Item has been created.
There are currently 9 built in "quick" Date Filters:
If you filter by Today, then only items that have been created in the past 24 hours will be fetched.
If you filter by 1 Week, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 7 days.
If you filter by 2 Weeks, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 14 days.
If you filter by 3 Weeks, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 21 days.
If you filter by 1 Month, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 30 days.
If you filter by 2 Month, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 60 days.
If you filter by 3 Months, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 90 days.
If you filter by 6 Months, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 180 days.
If you filter by Year, it will fetch items that have been created within the past 365 days.
NOTE: As with all the other Filters, you can Combine different filters groups together. eg, you can Filter by Featured & Past 2 Weeks along with the Prefix "For Sale"
Advanced: You can also do Custom Cutoff filtering by simply setting the cutoff url param to the number of days. Adding &cutoff=39 to any of the Item Listing pages that allow filtering is all you need to do. This comes in handy for a lot of things. People can bookmark Showcase Home with a custom cutoff so that they can see the content posted in the past 3 days (just an example).
Can this be disabled for those that don't want to use it? YES. You can enable/disable the Date Filters just like you can the other Filters.
NOTE: Disabling only removes the filters from the filter menu. The URL params can still be used regardless if the filter menu has been disabled.