WordPress Improved Human Time Difference

WordPress has a built in function, called human_time_diff, for creating messages that say how long ago a post was published – however I think it is confusing when you have posts from a long time ago that read “posted 15 months ago” since you then have to calculate the date.

So I thought I’d make an enhanced version of human_time_diff that checks how long ago the post was published and changes to the publication date if the post is older than 60 days. This way you get the nice clean ‘3 hours ago’ style message – or the clearer date listing on older content.

function bm_human_time_diff_enhanced( $duration = 60 ) {

	$post_time = get_the_time('U');
	$human_time = '';

	$time_now = date('U');

	// use human time if less that $duration days ago (60 days by default)
	// 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * $duration days
	if ( $post_time > $time_now - ( 60 * 60 * 24 * $duration ) ) {
		$human_time = sprintf( __( '%s ago', 'binarymoon'), human_time_diff( $post_time, current_time( 'timestamp' ) ) );
	} else {
		$human_time = get_the_date();
	}

	return $human_time;

}

//usage
echo bm_human_time_diff_enhanced();

Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).