Blogging from the future - forcing wordpress to show future dates

January 27, 2008 4:12 AM

How can I get wordpress to show a post as though it had been published in the future?

So, in a bid to stimulate both regular writing and generate some ideas for longer form work, I've come up with the idea of writing a blog that appears as though it's coming from twenty or thirty years in the future. Wordpress has a future-dating feature that lets you put a future date on a post, but as far as I can work out, that means it will hold that post until that date and time is reached.

Am I missing something, or is there a simple method (or plugin) that will let me publish a post now, today, but have the calendar and date show as a date in the future? For example, I post an entry today, Sunday 27th Jan, at 5pm GMT, but I want it to show up on the blog as, I dunno, Thursday 27th Jan 2028, 5pm GMT. How would I do that?

posted by Happy Dave to computers & internet (12 comments total)

When Wordpress shows the date of a post, it uses a simple PHP-function. So the fastest way to achieve this, would to change one of those functions.

Say when you place

<?php the_time('Y') ?> 

in a template, it shows the year that post was created. So, you'll need to change the function the_time in a way Y is always Y+20. Though it is probably best to create a function with a new name that calls those dates.
posted by ijsbrand at 4:45 AM on January 27

Great - now another stupid question - where do I find 'the_time'?
posted by Happy Dave at 5:11 AM on January 27

When you click on the "Write" tab to write your new post, just click on the "Post timestamp" underneath the categories list and all of taht on the sidebar. You can enter in any date and time you want.
posted by treesarefree at 5:26 AM on January 27

treesarefree, you can enter any date you like, but if it's a date in the future, wordpress won't publish the post until the date is reached.
posted by Happy Dave at 5:32 AM on January 27

Is it a self hosted blog, or one on Wordpress.com?
posted by Solomon at 5:38 AM on January 27

Self-hosted.
posted by Happy Dave at 5:42 AM on January 27

What version of Wordpress are you using? I'm on 2.3.2, and I set the date to 2009, published, and it shows up as 2009.
posted by Solomon at 6:00 AM on January 27

Never mind me, I'm talking nonsense. Sorry.
posted by Solomon at 6:02 AM on January 27

Happy Dave: I just checked it on mine with one that was already published and it let me change it to 27 January, 2010 withoput a problem
posted by treesarefree at 6:04 AM on January 27

I wonder if this might help? You could possibly modify your template to include some of the code? Quie how you'd do that is beyond me, though.
posted by Solomon at 6:10 AM on January 27

Or, you could grab the The Future Is Now plugin, that will enable all future dated posts to show up on the blog anyway, irrespective of date. It only works for posts you publish after you active it, though.
posted by Solomon at 6:15 AM on January 27

Solomon, thanks, that worked absolutely perfectly!
posted by Happy Dave at 6:30 AM on January 27