Hi,
It sounds very much like you’ve run into a Unix system limitation. The operating system “starts” on the last day of 1969.
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000982.html
So if you’re using a Unix date function, then that would explain it, and you’ll likely need to make something custom for that.
cheers
Now then I’ve looked around and found this post http://wordpress.org/support/topic/pre-1970-dates-no-longer-handled-correctly?replies=12 which says to comment out this code in the wp-includes/functions.php file:
if ( false === $i || intval($i) < 0 ) {
if ( ! $gmt )
$i = current_time( 'timestamp' );
else
$i = time();
// we should not let date() interfere with our
// specially computed timestamp
$gmt = true;
}
which works perfectly and now dates are displaying as far back as I need i.e. 1932 but a couple of things:
1. Is it okay to do this i.e. will it affects anything else and…
2. Is there are a better way of doing this so when I update WordPress I don’t have to update that file each time?
Well, I’ve gone ahead and done the above and all’s working well. Just need to remember to comment out the code on each new WordPress release!
Don’t edit core code! Apart from the risk of breaking your entire site, you may create security loopholes in your WordPress install.
Is there are a better way of doing this
Yes. Use custom fields for pre-1970 dates in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
Hi. Thanks for this – can you explain what code I would enter and how I would display it in my template. Thanks.
See Using_Custom_Fields. You can suppress the real post date in your theme’s template files and even display posts in pre-1970 “date” order by using a custom query.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/WP_Query
I ended up using this:
<?php if( $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, "year", true) ): ?>
<?php echo $image; ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php the_time('Y') ?>
<?php endif; ?>
My company’s outlined a temporary workaround here, and a full-fledged WordPress plugin is in the works. We’ll release it in the next few weeks.
Keep an eye on the SH site, our Google Code project site, and the SH WordPress plugins pages:
– http://studiohyperset.com/projects/wordpress-plugins
– http://profiles.wordpress.org/users/studiohyperset/
… for more details.
