Dynamic date?

The dates that are displayed with each post are saved when the posts are saved (as in they’re static). As far as the *current date* goes, that’s pretty simple with PHP’s date() function. Read that page to get the formatting that you want. Here’s the formatting that the loopinsight.com site you linked to uses:

<?php echo date( 'F d, Y' ); ?>

You could force that captalization of the month name with either CSS’s text-transform property or directly in PHP with strtoupper().

Ahhh, I get it. Just thinking off the top of my head, here’s a solution that could work. What you need to do is use WP_Query and order your posts by their date descending (in other words newest posts come first). Now right before the loop, create a variable to keep track of date/time information. On each iteration of the loop, check to see if the date/time of the current post is different than that of the saved date/time. If it is, output the new date/time and reset the variable to be this new value. Otherwise do nothing.

Hope this logic doesn’t sound too confusing the way I’m presenting it. Here’s sort of an (untested) example of what I mean:

// Variable to store date/time
$datetime = null;

// WordPress Loop
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

	// If datetime is null, set it to the current datetime.
	// Otherwise, perform the output check.
	if ( $datetime === null ) {
		$datetime = (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' );
	} else if ( (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' ) > $datetime ) {
		// This post was made on a new day, so output that day:
		the_time( 'F d, Y' );
	}

	// Normal wordpress posts output like title and content.
	// These will be ran on every iteration of the loop (as usual)
	// but the datetime will only be printed when a new day
	// is reached.
	the_title();
	the_content();
	// etc..

endwhile;
endif;

Let me know if anything needs clarification.

Hey, no problem.

Honestly, you can format the date however you like. A div with a special class wouldn’t be bad. You’d need to add the div itself to the index file where the date is being outputted. As for the styling, you’d need to either edit style.css or create your own stylesheet and put it in there. Might look something like this:

/* style.css */
.my-post-date {
	color: #999;
	margin-bottom: 0.5em;
	/* whatever other styles you want */
}

/* index.php */
<div class="my-post-date">
	<?php the_time( 'F d, Y' ); ?>
</div>

You need to remove that first occurrence of the_time(). You only want that to output if the condition is met. Also, you need to initialize $datetime *before* the loop, otherwise it will just reset to null on every iteration rendering it useless.

<?php

	$datetime = null;
	if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

	if ( $datetime === null ) {
		$datetime = (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' );
	} else if ( (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' ) > $datetime ) { ?>
		<div class="my-post-date">
			<?php the_time( 'F d, Y' ); ?>
		</div>
	<?php }

	?>

Oops, I accidentally posted it with the closing tag after the loop line. Change this:

if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

to this:

if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

Sorry again, I see another problem. As I was saying last night, none of this code I’m giving you is tested, it’s just a foundation more or less. But I do see one thing that I forgot to put in there. We’re not actually ever setting the new datetime if it succeeds. Also, we need to actually echo the first datetime as well. Change only this part:

<?php

$datetime = null;
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

if ( $datetime === null ) {
	$datetime = (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' );
} else if ( (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' ) > $datetime ) { ?>
	<div class="my-post-date">
		<?php the_time( 'F d, Y' ); ?>
	</div>
<?php }

?>

to this:

<?php

$datetime = null;
if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

if ( $datetime === null ) {
	$datetime = (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' );
	?>

	<div class="my-post-date">
		<?php the_time( 'F d, Y' ); ?>
	</div>

	<?php
} else if ( (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' ) > $datetime ) {
	$datetime = (int) get_the_time( 'Ymd' ); // reseting the datetime
	?>

	<div class="my-post-date">
		<?php the_time( 'F d, Y' ); ?>
	</div>

	<?php
}

?>