W-Shadow.com

I recently stumbled upon a great jQuery plugin called “timeago” that lets you easily create fuzzy timestamps (e.g. “5 minutes ago”, “about 2 months ago”, etc). So I wrote a quickie WP plugin that you can use to add this neat feature to your blog.

About

Basically, with this plugin you can insert a little piece of code into your theme and get nice fuzzy timestamps for your posts/pages (see the Usage section below for details). The timestamps will even update automatically – that is, if you open a page that has a timestamp saying “Posted 1 minute ago” and wait 10 minutes without reloading the page, the timestamp will then say “Posted 11 minutes ago”. People who have JavaScript disabled will see normal, non-fuzzy timestamps instead.

Here’s a screenshot showing several example timestamps :

Note : The calendar icon is not included with the plugin. The site in the screenshot is using the iNove theme which adds these cute icons to post timestamps.

Download

fuzzy-timestamp.zip (4 KB)

Requirements :

• WordPress 2.9+
• PHP 5

Usage

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, go to the theme editor and insert <?php do_action('fuzzy_timestamp'); ?> whereever you want to use a fuzzy timestamp. For example, to use fuzzy timestamps on single post pages, open the single.php template file and replace any the WordPress loop; i.e. you can’t use to change the comment timestamps (yet).

You can also pass a second parameter to the do_action() function to specify the datetime format for the tool-tip that shows up when you mouse over a fuzzy timestamp (people who have JavaScript disabled will also see the timestamp in this format). The parameter syntax is equivalent to that used by the the_time() template function.

For example, if your theme displays the timestamps using code like this :

<?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?>

You can add the ”F jS, Y’ bit to the plugin’s code to use the same datetime format for the tool-tips and the no-JS fallback :

<?php do_action('fuzzy_timestamp', 'F jS, Y'); ?>

The timeago script also supports i18n/different languages, but I left that feature out to avoid over-complicating the plugin. Let me know if you’d like to see it added.