I set up super-sweet fuzzy "submitted by" timestamps on my blog a couple of days ago. They're quite a bit easier to grok at a glance, and they show the full date when you hover over them.
Go on, try it with the one at the top of this post. You know you want to.
Drupal 6.x makes tweaks like this easy. Here's how you can do it too:
Open up your theme's template.php file. If you're using a stock theme, copy the theme from Drupal core into your site's themes folder before editing anything.
Add these three functions:
/**
* Calculate a fuzzy delta between two timestamps. If only one timestamp is
* passed, uses 'now' as the other. Optionally takes a third 'granularity'
* parameter, which decides how many chunks to return. Default: 1.
*/
function _fuzzy_delta($to, $from = null, $granularity = 1) {
$times = array(
'year' => 31536000,
'month' => 2592000,
'week' => 604800,
'day' => 86400,
'hour' => 3600,
'minute' => 60,
'second' => 0
);
if ($from === null) $from = time();
$secs = abs($from - $to);
$count = 0;
$time = '';
foreach ($times as $name => $value) {
if ($secs >= $value) {
$slice = floor($secs / $value);
$time .= $slice . ' ' . $name;
if (($slice != 1)) $time .= 's';
$secs = $secs % $value;
$count++;
if ($count > $granularity - 1 || $secs == 0) break;
else $time .= ', ';
}
}
return $time;
}
function phptemplate_node_submitted($node) {
return t('posted by !username <span title="@long_date">@ago ago</span>',
array(
'!username' => theme('username', $node),
'@long_date' => format_date($node->created, 'long'),
'@ago' => _fuzzy_delta($node->created)
)
);
}
function phptemplate_comment_submitted($comment) {
$node = node_load($comment->nid);
return t('comment by !username <span title="@date">@later later</span>',
array(
'!username' => theme('username', $comment),
'@date' => format_date($comment->timestamp, 'long'),
'@later' => _fuzzy_delta($comment->timestamp, $node->created),
)
);
}
If you want comments to use "ago" formatting instead of "later", use this version of phptemplate_comment_submitted instead:
function phptemplate_comment_submitted($comment) {
return t('comment by !username <span title="@date">@ago ago</span>',
array(
'!username' => theme('username', $comment),
'@date' => format_date($comment->timestamp, 'long'),
'@ago' => _fuzzy_delta($comment->timestamp),
)
);
}
Now check out your hot new datestamps!
Note: For my theme, I had to change the comment.tpl.php template file. You might have to change that and/or your node template files. Here's the chunk I had to add to mine:
<div class="submitted"><?php print theme('comment_submitted', $comment); ?></div>
Enjoy.
