Change custom post status to draft before today

Question

I tried this code which I made but looks like I am not doing it correctly..

The main problem is my code fetches all posts ordered by meta value date, but I need to hide the posts from the date today (which I am unable to do), so I did this from php strtotime (which is also fine), but the main issue is I need only 5 latest posts...

If some one can give a tip to get this code to work it would be great

echo '<ul class="whats-on" id="owl-demo">';
global $wp_query;
$tDate = strtotime('now');
$query = new WP_Query( 
    array(
        'post_type' => 'event',
        'posts_per_page' => 999,
        'post_status' => 'publish',
        'meta_key'=>'event_date',  
        'orderby' => 'meta_value', 
        'order' => ASC
    )
);    
$count = 0;

while ( $query->have_posts() ) : $query->the_post();
    $database_date = get_field('event_date');
    if( strtotime($database_date) > strtotime('now') ) {
        $count++;
        if ($count !="6") {
            echo '<li class="item">';
            echo '<a href="' . the_permalink() . '">';
            echo '<img src="' . bloginfo('template_url') . '/timthumb.php?src=' . the_field('cover') . '&w=170&h=228" class="img-responsive">';
            echo '<h2>' . get_the_title() . '</h2><p>';
            $originalDate = get_field('event_date');
            $newDate = date("l M d", strtotime($originalDate));
            echo $newDate . '</p></a></li>';
        }
    }
endwhile;

wp_reset_postdata();
echo '</ul>';

Answer 1

Do the other post have to be set to draft? Or would just showing today's post work? If just showing today's post works you could do something like the following

$today = getdate();
$args = array(
    'category_name' => 'event',
    'posts_per_page' => 5,
    'year' => $today["year"],
    'monthnum' => $today["mon"],
    'day' => $today["mday"]
);
query_posts( $args );