Change the post date format

Hi Jane,

Really cool implementation of WP Tiles there on your website! Hats off 🙂

The simplest way of getting the date to display M d, Y, is by setting the date format for your whole WP install to that format. The first WP Tiles date option defaults to the one from your options.

If this is not an option, however, you need to do something more hacky. I’ve been meaning to implement a filter for the byline format, but never got around to it. I may include it in the next release.

Until that time, you can loop over all the tiles data using the wp-tiles-data filter. You can do something like this:

add_filter( 'wp-tiles-data', function( $tiles, $posts ) {
    $post = reset( $posts );
    foreach ( $tiles as &$tile ) {
        $tile['byline'] = mysql2date( 'M d, Y', $post->post_date );
        $post = next( $posts );
    }
}, 10, 2 );

Once you have this function, you can modify the byline to suit your needs exactly. To separate month day and year, change it to this:

add_filter( 'wp-tiles-data', function( $tiles, $posts ) {
    $post = reset( $posts );
    foreach ( $tiles as &$tile ) {
        list( $month, $day, $year ) = array(
            mysql2date( 'M', $post->post_date ),
            mysql2date( 'd', $post->post_date ),
            mysql2date( 'Y', $post->post_date )
        );

        $formatted_date =
            "<span class='month'>$month</span>
             <span class='day'>$day</span>
             <span class='year'>$year</span>";

        $tile['byline'] = $formatted_date;
        $post = next( $posts );
    }
    return $tiles;
}, 10, 2 );

Good luck!
Mike

Hehe, no problem. WP settings can be a mess sometimes (‘wait.. I’m sure there was a setting for that somewhere‘).

Anyway, if you drop the second snippet in your functions.php, it should work out of the box and the css snippet should work as well (just make sure you add a ‘.’ before wp-tile-container).

That said, the snippet is using a closure, which only works with PHP >= 5.3. To really make it work anywhere, turn it into something like this:

add_filter( 'wp-tiles-data', 'wp_tiles_custom_date_formatting', 10, 2 );
function wp_tiles_custom_date_formatting( $tiles, $posts ) {
    $post = reset( $posts );
    foreach ( $tiles as &$tile ) {
        list( $month, $day, $year ) = array(
            mysql2date( 'M', $post->post_date ),
            mysql2date( 'd', $post->post_date ),
            mysql2date( 'Y', $post->post_date )
        );

        $formatted_date =
            "<span class='month'>$month</span>
             <span class='day'>$day</span>
             <span class='year'>$year</span>";

        $tile['byline'] = $formatted_date;
        $post = next( $posts );
    }
    return $tiles;
}