I wanted a way of displaying the current date in WordPress. Ideally, I wanted to use a shortcode that would display it.
After I checked out the built-in shortcodes native to WordPress, and verified there was not a shortcode for displaying the current date, I looked for a plugin that did it. I found quite a few plugins that generated a shortcode to display the current date. I then thought about adding yet another plugin to my website just to display the date.
I decided to create it myself without a plugin.
This is what I came up with:
I copied the above code and pasted at the end of the function.php file in my website’s theme folder. I then placed the following shortcode where I wanted the current date to be displayed:
The result was the following:
I formatted the PHP date() function with the following format parameters:
“l” – A full textual representation of the day of the week.
“j” – The day of the month without leading zeros.
“F” – A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March.
“Y” – A full numeric representation of a year with four digits.
If you would like to use this code, but want to change the way the current date gets displayed, you can see a full list of the format parameters by going here.