As you have noticed, I do not display the time on my posts – just the date. However, anything published between midnight and 5am gets the words “in the small hours” appended to the datestamp, to indicate that even though it was technically posted on date D according to some atomic clock in a large city in Europe, it was posted on D-1 according to my internal daily rhythms.
To implement this, I use the function `get_the_time(‘G’)`. This should return a number between 0 and 23 which indicates the hour of the post’s timestamp. However, this stopped working, and it would actually return a very large number (of the order of about 1.1 billion) so the test failed. I don’t know whether this was caused by the upgrade to WordPress 2.5, or my recent move to a different server.
I managed to “fix” the problem by commenting out the following few lines near the top of `mysql2date` (defined in `wp-includes/functions.php`)
if( ‘G’ == $dateformatstring ) {
return gmmktime(
(int) substr( $m, 11, 2 ), (int) substr( $m, 14, 2 ), (int) substr( $m, 17, 2 ),
(int) substr( $m, 5, 2 ), (int) substr( $m, 8, 2 ), (int) substr( $m, 0, 4 )
);
}
However, this is not the ideal solution. Firstly, it’s hard to know if this change is causing a breakage elsewhere in the system (where the code relies upon this apparent bug). Secondly, when I upgrade to a new version of WordPress, I have to remember to fix the new `functions.php`
I discovered a better solution to the problem. I put `functions.php` back to its original state, and then replaced my calls to `get_the_time(‘G’)` with `get_the_time(‘G ‘)` – note the added space. `$dateformatstring != ‘G’` but the function returns the desired result. Get in.
I would report this on the WordPress support forums but I can’t be bothered to create an account.
*Update: I’ve discovered that the offending block of code was added for WordPress 2.5 to address this issue.*