Different Home Page action

I think the description under the “Use post date” checkbox is incorrect… it may be a case that I modified the plugin’s functionality based on a user’s feature request, and didn’t realize that change conflicted with how this checkbox’s functionality is described.

I was just looking at how I have the plugin set up on my own blog (https://blog.room34.com) and I actually have two widgets in the sidebar, one labeled “On This Day” which has “Use post date” unchecked, and another called “On This Post’s Date” with “Use post date” checked.

On the home page (or archive pages) only the “On This Day” one is displayed, and on individual posts they’re both displayed.

I think I may need to change the checkbox into a dropdown with different options, in order to get both your intended functionality and the current functionality (for people who are relying on it as it is) to work.

Before I do that, you may want to consider the approach I have set up on my own blog as described above, unless you do not want to have both widgets (for “today” and the post’s date) displaying on individual posts.

Thanks… I do like the idea of having it work the way you thought it was going to work — especially since the instruction under the checkbox says it will! — but anyway in the next update I will either change that text, or change the configuration to a dropdown to allow both ways to work.

This might be a timezone issue. Go to Settings > General and make sure the timezone is set correctly.

Also be sure to use the city name not a UTC offset. This isn’t quite so important with this plugin, but I have another plugin for displaying calendar feeds and it is really important there. The city helps adapt for daylight saving time and also avoids some other obscure PHP issues.

It’s possible that the plugin itself is using one of the wrong date functions and is basing it off of UTC+0 instead of your local time. This was another thing I went through extensively with that calendar plugin but I think has been easier to not notice with this one. I live in the US Central timezone, so if the plugin were using UTC+0, I’d only notice a discrepancy on my site between 7 PM and midnight local time. I think most of the other users of this plugin that I’ve interacted with are also in the US, so it’s easy for this to go unnoticed… but not to someone in Australia!

My calendar plugin’s users are primarily in Europe but all over the world, and any date/time issues with that one are much more readily apparent. Anyway, I’ll review this plugin’s use of the date/time functions and release an update if there are any problems there.

What really confuses me as I type this is that I see on your site it’s showing a “today” post for November 20. It’s 5:45 PM (US Central) on November 18. I don’t see how it could be shifting by that much! But maybe once I’ve reviewed the code something will reveal itself.

Yes… as it happens, today was a PERFECT day for you to report this issue, because the problem was happening on my own blog — one of the “today” posts was coming up as November 17, not November 18, because it was published at 1:43 AM.

Turns out in one spot I was relying on a PHP function for generating a Unix timestamp that was not accounting for timezone discrepancies… so the plugin wasn’t actually loading the wrong posts, it was just displaying the wrong publish date if it was published at a time when your local timezone was on a different date than UTC+0/GMT. (Although, actually, in reverse… ugh.)

Anyway, I realized that when I had written that line of code I was obviously way too deep inside my own head, because all I really needed to be doing was getting the post’s publish date with a standard WordPress function.

I’ve reworked the code to do that, and it seems to be working properly. Unfortunately I have another issue that will delay releasing this update. I just updated my Mac OS this week, and was unaware that doing so would uninstall the Subversion command line app, so I’m not able to check in any code changes at the moment. Working on getting that installed now… an update should be available within the next few hours though!

Does this also explain the missing 3rd post when looking at 2020/10/07?

I’m not sure about that… we’ll have to see what happens when you get the update.