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.

open your functions.php and paste this code, a complete function that will return the “time ago” output .

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.

Facebook style “Time Ago” for WordPress
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