Title: No dates before 1969? Last modified: August 18, 2016 --- # No dates before 1969? * [jemimap](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jemimap/) * (@jemimap) * [22 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/) * I have an MT demo blog with dates in the 1500’s. When I tried to import the entries to WP, the timestamps were all changed to 6:59pm on 12/31/1969. This was with RC2 on MacOS X. Is this a MySQL restriction, or is there hope yet for my wacky demo? Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total) * [Jack](https://wordpress.org/support/users/moxie/) * (@moxie) * [22 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-54432) * It would be funny though to have the first post in your blog dated as your actual birthday, the very beginning of it all. Except in my case this isn’t possible 🙁 -> 1963 (sigh…) * Thread Starter [jemimap](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jemimap/) * (@jemimap) * [22 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-54470) * No, I wasn’t blogging in the 1500’s – I was just experimenting. I can change the dates to something equally silly in the future, but for the record this is a feature MT has and WP doesn’t. See [http://jemimap.freeshell.org/moveablecolor/](http://jemimap.freeshell.org/moveablecolor/)– the month names are in Portuguese, which was as close as I could get to Latin in MT. * Anonymous * [21 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55237) * Haven’t been around these forums lately, was wondering if anyone else was worried about UNIX epoch. A little while back, I wrote a work-around for WP 1.0 that used and open source library of time calculations (adodb, I think?), and it seemed( on the surface) to work OK. This wasn’t too hard because WP stores the data-time field as a date data type in the DB, so no information is lost! Other tools are* much* harder to hack because they store them as integers – specifically int(10)’ s. There were 5 or 6 places that needed modification, most calls went through a common set of time utilities. Not sure if this is still the case. Why would someone want to do this? Not necessarily in a traditional blog, but I’ve run into historical societies, museums, etc., that want bios and “timelines” that are sortable, searchable and inter-related. With categories, profiles and “blogs”, you can do a lot of cool stuff! * Anonymous * [21 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55238) * [Pepys Diary](http://www.pepysdiary.com/) runs on MT and uses dates from the 17th century, so if they wanted to switch to WP they couldn’t. 🙁 Out of interest is there any limitation on how far in the future you can post? * [serendipity](https://wordpress.org/support/users/serendipity/) * (@serendipity) * [21 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55239) * It should be a very easy hack to translate the output of the date tag. * Anonymous * [21 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55240) * Here’s the short doc at the top of the adodb code: PHP native date functions use integer timestamps for computations. Because of this, dates are restricted to the years 1901-2038 on Unix and 1970-2038 on Windows due to integer overflow for dates beyond those years. This library overcomes these limitations by replacing the native function’s signed integers (normally 32-bits) with PHP floating point numbers (normally 64-bits). Dates from 100 A.D. to 3000 A.D. and later have been tested. The minimum is 100 A.D. as <100 will invoke the 2 => 4 digit year conversion. The maximum is billions of years in the future, but this is a theoretical limit as the computation of that year would take too long with the current implementation of adodb_mktime(). ———————————————————————————— Technically, the db field itself should port into the WP db from MT. But the time functions, like mktime() are the problem. On 1.0x, I made a few changes to “functions.inc” and “template-functions. inc”, but they got broken out further in 1.2. There’s also some localization decisions you will have to make (like if you enter a date prior to 1884, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, as GMT was only established in 10/1884 ). And there are a other years that are affected by when the country in question adopted the Gregorian Calendar (affecting the month list and back/next keys). If you look at Pepys Diary on the [archive page](http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/), you’ll see that they list the years as “1659/60” to indicate that in England pre 1752, the new years was in March, dispite other Catholic countries of Europe having standardized on January 1 in 1622. Just some trivia for the time-weary public! I’m working with another “community freeware” tool right now but I can say that the WP 1.0 was very easy to hack and took only a few hours to change and test. * [pezastic](https://wordpress.org/support/users/pezastic/) * (@pezastic) * [21 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55335) * I wish someone would fix (er… hack) this on WordPress 1.5 to make it display dates before 1969. * [asilon](https://wordpress.org/support/users/asilon/) * (@asilon) * [21 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55347) * I’ve just started creating a WP1.5 blog based on my grandmother’s diaries for 1940 and 1941 and ran into this problem – just wondered whether anyone had … er, fixed this yet? Or could offer me any helpful suggestions? * [MaryE](https://wordpress.org/support/users/marye/) * (@marye) * [21 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55348) * You can try these instructions (note the use at your own risk disclaimer): * [http://wordpress.org/support/topic/27367#post-194153](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/27367#post-194153) Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total) The topic ‘No dates before 1969?’ is closed to new replies. * In: [Installing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/installation/) * 9 replies * 7 participants * Last reply from: [MaryE](https://wordpress.org/support/users/marye/) * Last activity: [21 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-dates-before-1969/#post-55348) * Status: not resolved ## Topics ### Topics with no replies ### Non-support topics ### Resolved topics ### Unresolved topics ### All topics