WordPress post dating – pre 1901?

Question

This is something totally new to me, so I did some research. What an exciting question!

I had a look at the how WP saves the date when a post is saved. WP runs post date through wp_checkdate(), which uses PHP native function checkdate(). According to the PHP docs checkdate() considers any year between 1 and 32767 valid, so 1800’s shouldn’t be a problem.

I tested the saving behaviour locally and created a post with a date of 1856-09-03. The date got saved correctly to the database, but it wasn’t showing on the dashboard or the public view of the site.

I then look how (get_)the_date() works, in case you’re using it in your page templates. It basically turns the post_date into unix timestamp, if I understood correctly, which is limited to 1901-2038 as explaned here, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3985764/display-past-dates-before-the-year-1800. Luckily that very same Q&A also has the solution to the date problem – DateTime.

Here’s how to replace default date formatting with DateTime in (get_)the_date().

add_filter( 'get_the_date', function($the_date, $d, $post){
  $date = new DateTime( $post->post_date );
  return $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'); // change formatting as needed
}, 10, 3 );

With that filter I got 1856-09-03 showing inside the post loop when using the_date().

To get the old dates showing on the posts list, you can do this,

add_filter( 'manage_posts_columns', function($columns){
  unset($columns['date']); // remove default date column
  $columns['real_date'] = __('Date'); // replace with custom column
  return $columns;
});

add_action( 'manage_posts_custom_column' , function( $column, $post_id ){
  if ( 'real_date' === $column ) {
    global $post;
    $date = new DateTime( $post->post_date );
    echo $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
  }
}, 10, 2 );

add_filter( 'manage_edit-post_sortable_columns', function($columns){
  unset($columns['date']);
  $columns['real_date'] = __('Date'); // make custom date column sortable
  return $columns;
});

To change the post date shown on the post edit screen’s Publish metabox, I think the only option is to use js/jquery as I didn’t notice any filters related to it.

EDIT

And if you want to use the default date formatting you’ve set in the General Settings, you can get it with get_option( 'date_format' );. This way you don’t need to hardcode the date formats to the filters above, e.g. 'Y-m-d H:i:s'.

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