How to: Create facebook or twitter style “x-time ago” date format in php

Normally date formats are like “ January 1 2010 10:40:25 GMT” , “01 Mar 2010” . etc . But here I tell you ‘how to show date like “1 minutes ago” , “2 days ago” , displayed in Facebook , Twitter etc..

In php time(); function returns a Unix Value of current date and time like 123454487 . We can convert Unix value to readable date format using date(); function.

Here is the simple php code for display date as Twitter or Facebook style .

function ShowDate($date) // $date -->  time(); value
{
$stf = 0;
$cur_time = time();
$diff = $cur_time - $date;
$phrase = array('second','minute','hour','day','week','month','year','decade');
$length = array(1,60,3600,86400,604800,2630880,31570560,315705600);

for($i =sizeof($length)-1; ($i >=0)&amp;&amp;(($no =  $diff/$length[$i])< =1); $i--); if($i < 0) $i=0; $_time = $cur_time  -($diff%$length[$i]);
$no = floor($no); if($no <> 1) $phrase[$i] .='s'; $value=sprintf("%d %s ",$no,$phrase[$i]);

if(($stf == 1)&amp;&amp;($i >= 1)&amp;&amp;(($cur_tm-$_time) > 0)) $value .= time_ago($_time);

return $value.' ago ';
}

WordPress users please use this code :

<?php  echo human_time_diff(get_the_time('U'),current_time('timestamp')) .' ago'; ?>

If you have any feedback, bug reports please comment below. Happy coding