Customising comment date in Genesis 2.2

In the Genesis Slack Group ( #code-snippets channel) Brian Bourn mentioned a new filter in Genesis 2.2 that allows you to customise the comment meta data.

And right there on lines 317 – 333 in the genesis/lib/structure/comments.php file is:

/**
* Allows developer to control whether to print the comment date.
*
* @since 2.2.0
*
* @param boolean $comment_date Whether to print the comment date
* @param string  $post_type    The current post type
*/
$comment_date = apply_filters( 'genesis_show_comment_date', true, get_post_type() );

if ( $comment_date ) {
	printf( '<p %s>', genesis_attr( 'comment-meta' ) );
	printf( '<time %s>', genesis_attr( 'comment-time' ) );
	printf( '<a href="%s" %s>', esc_url( get_comment_link( $comment->comment_ID ) ), genesis_attr( 'comment-time-link' ) );
	echo    esc_html( get_comment_date() ) . ' ' . __( 'at', 'genesis' ) . ' ' . esc_html( get_comment_time() );
	echo    '</a></time></p>';
}

So if $comment_date is set to true, the comment dates are output and if its false, they don\’t.

Therefore to simply remove the comment dates from your comments you can use the WordPress __return_false function and put the following line in your functions file:

// Remove the date and time on comments in Genesis child themes
add_filter( 'genesis_show_comment_date', '__return_false' );

And your comments go from this

to this

(The edit link is showing because I was logged in when I created these screenshots)

The reason I was excited to hear about this new filter is because on my own web design agency\’s website I wanted to remove the time from my comments (and keep the date) but to do so I had use the genesis_comment_list_args filter to use my own custom version of the genesis_html5_comment_callback function. And that\’s quite a few lines of code!

But now with this new filter in Genesis 2.2, there is a neater way:

You can also view this code on github.

add_filter( 'genesis_show_comment_date', 'jmw_show_comment_date_with_link' );
/**
 * Show Comment Date with link but without the time
 *
 * Stop the output of the Genesis core comment dates and outputs comments with date and link only.
 * The genesis_show_comment_date filter was introduced in Genesis 2.2 (will not work with older versions)
 *
 * @author Jo Waltham
 * @link http://www.jowaltham.com/customising-comment-date-genesis/
 *
 * @param boolean $comment_date Whether to print the comment date or not
 * @return boolean Whether to print the comment date or not
 */
function jmw_show_comment_date_with_link( $comment_date ) {

	printf('<p %s><time %s><a href="%s" %s>%s</a></time></p>',
		genesis_attr( 'comment-meta' ),
		genesis_attr( 'comment-time' ),
		esc_url( get_comment_link( get_comment_ID() ) ),
		genesis_attr( 'comment-time-link' ),
		esc_html( get_comment_date() )
	);

	// Return false so that the parent function doesn't output the comment date, time and link
	return false;
}

Which makes the comments look like this:

And finally, the reason why this topic came up in the slack channel in the first place is that Paal wanted to show only the date without the link. So one quick further customisation …

(View this code on github)

add_filter( 'genesis_show_comment_date', 'jmw_show_comment_date_only' );
/**
 * Show date on comments without time or link
 *
 * Stop the output of the Genesis core comment dates and outputs comments with date only
 * The genesis_show_comment_date filter was introduced in Genesis 2.2 (will not work with older versions)
 *
 * @author Jo Waltham
 * @link http://www.jowaltham.com/customising-comment-date-genesis/
 *
 * @param boolean $comment_date Whether to print the comment date or not
 * @return boolean Whether to print the comment date or not
 */
function jmw_show_comment_date_only( $comment_date ) {

	printf('<p %s><time %s>%s</time></p>',
		genesis_attr( 'comment-meta' ),
		genesis_attr( 'comment-time' ),
		esc_html( get_comment_date() )
	);

	// Return false so that the parent function doesn't output the comment date, time and link
	return false;
}

You get this:

I love Genesis filters 🙂

Please note this filter will only work if you are using Genesis 2.2 or later and a HTML5 theme.

Featured Image: Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash