Rob Barrett

Quick WordPress Tip: Style Posts According to Date

Posted on March 6, 2009 at 5:21pm

Ever wanted to give a post element a different look and feel (or even include/exclude content) based on a post’s publication date? I got asked about this earlier today, and I figured it would be a handy tip to share.

I don’t claim to be a PHP coder, so while it does work, it could be that this can be shortened somewhat. Feel free to use it as a base for making it more efficient, if you’d like (and if you can, I’d love to see what you come up with!).

OK… Somewhere within the Loop, before the area you want to customise, enter the following:

<?php $postdate = the_date('Y-m-d','','',false) ?>

That tells WP to find out the publication date of a post and to assign it to the function, $postdate. You can then call that function later in the post. For example:

<p<?php if ($postdate < date("2008-12-29")) { echo ' class="old"'; } ?>>

That snippet of code will check to see if the post was published after 29th December, 2008. If not, it will be assigned the “old” class, and you can style that however you like through your stylesheet.

Of course, it’s not limited to CSS styling — you can place whatever you like within the if statement, so you could, say, choose to show full posts after a certain date, and excerpts of posts written earlier.

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