Sometimes theres an instance when you want to replace WordPress’ the_modified_date with the date of the most recent comment. I recently needed to do this when I was working on a small, light project tracker plugin for my department at work. In my projects archive there is a list of projects as shown below:
In this case I have comments setup as project updates, so when a team member looks at the table I wanted them to see the last time the project was updated (or a comment was posted). In the code below you will see how I replaced the date that the post itself was last modified with the date of the most recent comment while using the_modified_date as a fall back for projects that had no comments or updates.
You would replace:
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<?php the_modified_date( ); ?> |
With this:
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<?php // Get the current post's ID. $id = get_the_ID(); // Use the above ID to find out how many comments are attached to the post. $comment_num = get_comments_number( $id ); // If there are more than 0 comments attached, run the comment query. if ( $comment_num > 0 ) { // Force the newest comment into position [0] in the array returned to $comments. $comment_query = array( 'order' => 'DESC', ); $comments = get_comments( $comment_query ); // Print the date of the most recent comment. echo $comments[0]->comment_date; // Otherwise print the last date that the post was modified. } else { the_modified_date( ); } ?> |
this code produces this:
As you can see, the default dates do not look the same, a little bit of code on line 17 that will fix this:
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<?php // Get the current post's ID. $id = get_the_ID(); // Use the above ID to find out how many comments are attached to the post. $comment_num = get_comments_number( $id ); // If there are more than 0 comments attached, run the comment query. if ( $comment_num > 0 ) { // Force the newest comment into position [0] in the array returned to $comments. $comment_query = array( 'order' => 'DESC', ); $comments = get_comments( $comment_query ); // Print the date of the most recent comment. echo $comments[0]->comment_date; // Otherwise print the last date that the post was modified. } else { the_modified_date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s' ); } ?> |
Adding that code will give you this result:
