Movalog Blog

In a recent thread on the MT forums, a person asked how you could make the dates on entries relative to the current time. This means instead of "Posted on August 1st 2004" it would be "Posted 3 days ago." You could use the RelativeDate plugin but that would require you to rebuild your pages everyday (of course this can be done via a cron job).

Lucky I found this PHP script written by Kristine (kadyellebee on the forums). For this code to work, you will need to be using PHP enabled templates. Towards the top of your templates you should find a tag similar to

<$MTEntryDate$>

Just replace that with

<?php
//offset is how many hours away you are from your server.
$offset = "0";

$today = strtotime("now - $offset hours");
$mtdate = strtotime("<$MTEntryDate format="%Y%m%d %H:%M"$>");

if (date("Ymd", $mtdate)==date("Ymd", $today)) {
$hours = date("G", ($today - $mtdate));
$mins = date("i", ($today - $mtdate));
if ($hours<1) {$hourword="minutes";
if ($mins<10) { $mins=str_replace("0", "", $mins); }
$hours=$mins; }
elseif ($hours==1) { $hourword="hour"; }
else { $hourword="hours"; }
echo "Posted ", $hours, " ", $hourword, " ago";
}
else {
$days = date("j", ($today-$mtdate));
if ($days==1) { echo "Posted yesterday"; }
else { echo "Posted ", $days, " days ago"; }
}
?>

The only thing you need to specify is the offset time - in bold above. Whilst testing it out I noticed a little quirk though, the timezone I am in is ahead of my server's so when I put in a positive number the script calculated incorrectly, if I used the corresponding negative number it worked.

So if you're in a timezone ahead of your server you may need to put a - in front of the difference in hours !