A year ago I was developing a Scheduling plugin for a client. I soon realized that there are many overlapping Date methods in PHP. Combined with the built-in WordPress methods, I was overwhelmed.

In this article, we will show you the best ways for working with Date object in WordPress.

1. DateTime Format

A quick reference on the common DateTime format. The complete list can be found in the official PHP doc.

2. Getting DateTime Object

CURRENT / TODAY DATE:

echo current_time('d/m/Y');
echo current_time('mysql'); // 'mysql' is shortcut of 'Y-m-d H:i:s'
echo current_time('mysql', true); // in GMT timezone

// get DateTime object
$current_dt = current_datetime();
echo $current_dt->format('d/m/Y');

// if you want to use the format from Settings:
echo $current_date->format(get_option('date_format'));

FROM POST ID:

$post_date = get_post_datetime($post_id);
echo $post_date->format('d/m/Y');

CONVERT FROM STRING:

$meta_date = '13/01/2020';
$datetime = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $meta_date);

echo $datetime->format('d M Y'); // 13 Jan 2020

CONVERT FROM SPECIAL STRING:

Published date of Posts and Comments are stored in the format Y-m-d H:i:s. If the string is in that format, you can use a shortcut to convert:

$post_date = '2020-01-16 12:00:00';
$datetime = new DateTime($post_date);

echo $datetime->format('d M Y'); // 16 Jan 2020

3. Distance Between DateTimes

$datetime1 = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y H:i', '10/02/2019 10:00');
$datetime2 = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y H:i', '10/02/2020 23:00');

$diff = $datetime1->diff($datetime2);
$days_ago = $diff->days;
$months_ago = $diff->m + ($diff->y * 12);
$hours_ago = $diff->h + ($diff->days * 24);

echo "{$days_ago} days ago"; // 365 days ago
echo "{$hours_ago} hours ago"; // 8776 hours ago
echo "{$months_ago} months ago"; // 12 months ago

4. Modify DateTime

$datetime = DateTime::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', '10/02/2020');

$datetime->modify('+1 day');
echo $datetime->format('d M Y'); // 11 Feb 2020

$datetime->modify('+2 day +1 month');
echo $datetime->format('d M Y'); // 14 Mar 2020

$datetime->modify('-10 day -2 month -1 year');
echo $datetime->format('d M Y')); // 04 Jan 2019

Notes: The DateTime you get from current_datetime() can’t be modified. So you need to workaround like this:

$dt = new DateTime(current_time('mysql'));
$dt->modify('+30 day');

Conclusion

There are other methods, but I skip them because they’re doing the same thing like current_time().

All the above should cover most use cases in a WordPress site. Let us know in the comments if we are missing some important bits 🙂