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1. marky
   Member
   Posted 5 years ago #

   I'm trying to write a small plugin to display messages on my site depending on the day. (My site is updated on a very strict schedule, and I want to display when the next post will appear)

   Anyway, I'm using current_time('timestamp') to try and get the blog's time as set in the options (as opposed to GMT or the server's time).

   Unfortunately, it seems to be returning something very odd---neither the server's time, nor GMT. Perhaps it's the server's time minus the GMT offset in the options page. Either way, it's way off.

   Am I doing something wrong? If there an easy way to get the time that's configured in the WordPress options page?

2. Kafkaesqui
   Moderator
   Posted 5 years ago #

   current_time('timestamp') returns the time as a UNIX timestamp (that is, in seconds starting from 01/01/1970).

3. Otto
   Tech Ninja
   Posted 5 years ago #

   Getting the timestamp like that is useful if you want to actually compare it to some other timestamp (which you can generate from a string date/time by using the strtotime() function, or using one of the other PHP date/time functions).

   If you want to display the time as a text string, then you should use current_time('mysql') instead.

   As for what it returns, current_time will be the server time + the offset in the options page, and it will be equivalent to the time displayed on the options page itself.

4. marky
   Member
   Posted 5 years ago #

   Sorry, I should have clarified; I'm feeding current_time('timestamp') into the PHP date function to get the date. Specifically, for debug purposes, I'm echoing date('l dS F Y h:i:s A', current_time('timestamp')).

   It continues to return something extremely odd. As of 2006-11-07 14:00:00 GMT, for example, it was returning 2006-11-06 21:00:00. My GMT offset is -5 (i.e. EST). The server is on the west coast, but that still shouldn't explain the wild difference I'm seeing.

   Perhaps I should be adding the offset manually? I'm using Dreamhost, so I'd be very surprised if this is a server misconfiguration.

5. marky
   Member
   Posted 5 years ago #

   My apologies; I think I understand why I'm getting the wild difference. I had set my GMT offset to -11 by accident (while debugging around), and since the server is on the west coast, it was returning the time as PST - 11.

   Now, that's still not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm looking for GMT + offset. Is there a WP function that will give me that, or do I have to add gmt_offset() to the UTC time manually?

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