<?php 
/* 
Plugin Name: Future Posts
Version: v 0.0.1 
Plugin URI: http://www.andrewsw.com/wiki/moin.cgi/futurePostInfo
Description: This plugin will give you a function to determine the date of the next post that is in the future and is published, and a function to return the number of posts in the future that are marked as published.
 Author: Andrew Chen
Author URI: http://www.andrewsw.com 
*/ 

function dateOfNextFuturePost($printIt=1)
{ 
    global $wpdb, $tableposts, $tablepost2cat, $tablecategories, $post; 
     
    if (!isset($tableposts)) 
         $tableposts = $wpdb->posts; 
     
    //get post date of next future post 
    $dateOfFuturePost = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT post_date from $tableposts WHERE post_date > NOW() AND post_status = 'publish' ORDER BY post_date ASC LIMIT 1"); 
    if ($dateOfFuturePost) {
        $dateAsStringOfFuturePost = mysql2date(get_settings('date_format'),$dateOfFuturePost)." ".mysql2date(get_settings('time_format'), $dateOfFuturePost);
	if ($printIt) {print $dateAsStringOfFuturePost;};
	return $dateAsStringOfFuturePost;
    };
    return '';
};

function numberOfFuturePosts($printIt=1)
{ 
    global $wpdb, $tableposts, $tablepost2cat, $tablecategories, $post; 
     
    if (!isset($tableposts)) 
         $tableposts = $wpdb->posts; 
     
    //get post dates of next future posts 
    $datesOfFuturePosts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_date from $tableposts WHERE post_date > NOW() AND post_status = 'publish' ORDER BY post_date ASC"); 
    if ($datesOfFuturePosts) {
	$numFuturePosts = count($datesOfFuturePosts);
	if ($printIt) {print $numFuturePosts;};
	return $numFuturePosts;
    };
    return '';
};
 
?>