Facebook style “Time Ago” for WordPress
The last “Time Ago” function is short of few things, how about facebook style “Time ago” for posts and comments in wordpress. The last function that I wrote didn’t calculate for years, for example if I like to display “2 years ago” for a post published 2 years ago, it displayed “730 days ago”, which I didn’t like. So I have come up with a new function which will work for the following – Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Weeks, Months and Years.
function timeago()
{
global $post;
$unix_date = get_post_time('U', true, $post);
$periods = array("second", "minute", "hour", "day", "week", "month", "year", "decade");
$lengths = array("60","60","24","7","4.35","12","10");
$now = time();
// check validity of date
if(empty($unix_date)) {
return "Bad date";
}
// is it future date or past date
if($now > $unix_date) {
$difference = $now - $unix_date;
$tense = "ago";
} else {
$difference = $unix_date - $now;
$tense = "from now";
}
for($j = 0; $difference >= $lengths[$j] && $j < count($lengths)-1; $j++) {
$difference /= $lengths[$j];
}
$difference = round($difference);
if($difference != 1) {
$periods[$j].= "s";
}
return "$difference $periods[$j] {$tense}";
}
Now save your functions.php and wherever you want to display time ago just add this line
<?php echo timeago(); ?>
You can insert into category.php, single.php to display the time elapsed since the post was published. This function right now works for posts alone, soon I will publish with time elapsed display for comments too.
(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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pelister
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Tags: facebook style, posts, publish, time ago, time elapsed, Wordpress
Comments (5)
Neil Hillman
| #
Actually, people keep calling this “Facebook style Time Ago”, but it isn’t! You never see Facebook say “53 seconds ago”, or “4 weeks ago”, it uses “about a minute ago” for anything over a few seconds but under a minute, and “about a month ago” for anything over about 3 weeks. This is a much more simplistic time elapsed function, NOT like Facebook.
Reply
pelister
| #
Thanks Nieil, Your comment itself answers why this article is titled so.
Reply
Manoj Goel
| #
Hello Pelister,
I also want the same feature for Joomla site. Actually I want to display the “…… Time Ago” for my articles on my site instead of Publish date and time. Can you please provide the Joomla version of this coding? and how n where to apply in Joomla?
Thanks
Reply
pelister
| #
Hi Manoj,
I will try to post it for joomla too
Reply
Manoj Goel
| #
Thanks a lot I will wait and keep watching this space.
Reply