How to display relative dates in PW

[hafa]

How to display relative dates like the ones we often see in Tumblogs and other social networks?

Examples:

Just now

2 seconds ago
5 minutes ago
2 hours ago

Today

Yesterday
2 days ago
2 weeks ago

I have a feeling it would be kind of tricky, but with PW, who knows

[adrian]

Take a look at PHP's strtotime() - it should handle every you need.

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Let us know if you need any help making it work.

EDIT: I should also add that you will probably want to make use of PHP's date() to then format the results from unix time to something human readable: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

[WillyC]

echo wireRelativeTimeStr($page->date_field);

[hafa]

@WillyC - Should I include it somewhere in my frontend template? 

<span class='date'>{$entry->date}</span>

Thanks guys.

[adrian]

Willy, thanks for the heads up about that PW function. hafa - here is the details of that function:

https://github.com/ryancramerdesign/ProcessWire/blob/dev/wire/core/Functions.php

I had to look it up myself

[WillyC]

@WillyC - Should I include it somewhere in my frontend template? 

you.will find only what you  bring in

[hafa]

@adrian - Thanks for the link! 
 
So should I create a functions.php file containing the function wireRelativeTimeStr?
 
And in my template I just do what I normally do?
 
<span class='date'>{$entry->date}</span>

Is that correct?

[apeisa]

No, it means this is already supported on global scope in PW:

wireRelativeTimeStr($timestamp);

So try this in your template file to get started:

echo "This page was created " . wireRelativeTimeStr($page->created);

 

[hafa]

Hey @apeisa,

I'd like to display relative dates in blog posts. Is the code below the best way to do something like this?

<h1>{$blogPost->title}</h1>
<p class='date'>Posted <?php echo wireRelativeTimeStr($blogPost->date); ?></p>
<p>{$blogPost->content}</p>

[apeisa]

If you have datefield called date, then yes, looks good to me. Why not try and see how it works? (never used wireRelativeTimeStr myself)

[adrian]

BTW hafa - please ignore my original answer - I really didn't read your question properly at all 

[hafa]

@adrian - No worries buddy

@apeisa - Yup, going to later this evening.