The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Date and Time

In this tutorial, I’ll be going over The Date and The Time, and how can you use it to display your posts information. Hopefully you will find this ultimate guide easier to understand and follow than what’s available in the WordPress documentation.

The Date and Time format string

• l = Full name for day of the week (lower-case L).
• F = Full name for the month.
• j = The day of the month.
• S = The English suffix for the day of the month (e.g st, nd or th in the 1st, 2nd or 15th.)
• Y = The year in 4 digits. (lower-case y gives the year’s last 2 digits)

Here are examples of the various formats for date and time:

• l, F j, Y – Friday, March 5, 2009
• m/j/y g:i A – 05/12/09 7:30 AM
• j F Y – 25 May 2009
• Y – 2009

Adding the Date and the Time to your posts

You can display your post information in the post meta data section in the form of a sentence:

This entry was posted on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> at <?php the_time('g:i a'); ?> and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>

The result should be something like this :
This entry was posted on 15 August 2008 at 12:41 am and is filed under WordPress Tutorials.

Note: Even though we can use the_date() tag to display your post date, it is highly not recommended because when there are multiple posts on a page published under the SAME DAY, the_date() only displays the date for the first post (that is, the first instance of the_date()).

Display the Date and the Time your post was modified

The the_modified_date template tag displays the date your post was last modified, and the_modified_time() displays the last modified time. Note that these only work when used within the WordPress Loop, the code that generates your post content information.

Code :

This post was published on <?php the_date('F j, Y'); ?> and was last modified on <?php the_modified_date(); ?> at <?php the_modified_time() ?>


Result :
This post was published on July 4, 2008 and was last modified on December 13, 2009 at 7:30 am

This is helpful for helping update your readers so they know when your blog post was last updated. You can find more variations on using the date and time in the the_date and the_time() WordPress Template Tags, but let’s take this a little further.

Copyright Date

As you know, most copyright statements don’t need the full date, we only need the year. Many bloggers hard-code the year in their copyright statement (me too ). In my opinion, it is fine because it is not required us update regularly, just one per year. In fact we could use the PHP date commands to recreate a constantly updating year on the copyright statement.

Using the PHP date commands, you can set your copyright statement to automatically update every year

In your footer.php template file add the following code :
Copyright © <?php the_time('Y'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This will display:
Copyright © 2009 ThemeLib

Conclusion

So now you (hopefully) have a better insight on the WordPress Date and Time. Feel free to leave a comment if you liked it, hated it, couldn’t understand, whatever – I welcome all feedback. Do not forget to subscribe to my feed for all the latest updates on ThemeLib theme releases and new tutorials. Thanks for reading.

P/s: I “stole” the article title of the post The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress Loop on ThemeLab