If you’re like me, it might not always be easy to get new posts out to your blog. I’m trying to keep a new tech-tip going every regular weekday for a while to see how I keep up with that.

Since my content might not always be the newest, I may want to highlight when something was recently published.

Calculate posts published in the last two weeks

In the following example, I’m going to check to see if a post was published within the past two weeks. If so, I’m going to attach a notice to the title of the post. I’m assuming that the following code is going to go into a loop of posts, or somewhere that we’re already using the correct post ID.

$post_title = get_the_title();
if ( get_the_date( 'U' ) >= date( 'U', strtotime( '-2 weeks' ) ) ) {
    $post_title .= ' — New Post!';
}
echo $post_title;Code language: PHP (php)

First, on line one, we’re creating a variable in PHP called $post_title. This will hold the title of the post, which we get with the built-in WordPress function get_the_title(). Again, I’m assuming that we’re already in a loop for a specific post, but if not you can pass the ID of the post as an argument in that function.

Next, line two is going to get the date that the post was published in Unix Timestamp format. I’ve put it into that format to make it easy to compare. I am grabbing the date instead of the exact time since it doesn’t really matter to me if it was exactly within two weeks down to the second, just generally two weeks by day count.

The post publish date is compared to the current time minus two weeks, also in Unix Timestamp format. The PHP function strtotime() allows you to use human readable formats for time conversions, which we’re using to say “give me the time in Unix seconds for two weeks ago”.

If that comparison is true and the post was published less than two weeks ago, we’re going to append the text ” — New Post!” to the post title. By using a period followed by the equals sign, we’re saying that we want to concatenate, or add the new value to the existing variable.

Finally, on line five we’re echoing out the value of $post_title, meaning we’re printing it to the screen. So if I were to use the above code to display titles for this site and this post was published less than two weeks ago, the title would display as Display a Notice for New WordPress Posts — New Post!

How else could this be used?

One way that I use this code is for a custom post type that displays properties for sale for a client. They wanted to highlight some recent listings, and using this code along with some CSS let me put a fancy ribbon on the corner of property listings, as well as list the number of days that the home has been on the market.

If you have the need to calculate WordPress post publish date compared to the current date, I hope the above snippet has been a good place to start!

Republish