Gina,
Q: How to eliminate the dates from my posts…
It is the Twenty Ten Theme on wordpress. I need to remove it from my homepage as well as from the single posts.
To remove or not to remove the date and time from the blog posts is a different issue and we will cover that in the later part of this article.
First lets see how to remove the date being displayed on your theme.
Caution:
Make sure to take a backup of your theme before trying this.
General Themes:
In general, most themes would have < ?php the_time(); ?> in single.php or post.php file, present in your theme directory.
Usually the path is: /wp-content/themes/themeName
Log into your WordPress blog: Click on Edit under Appearance menu.
Click on single.php or post.php file to edit it.
remove that code or comment it out, save the file and refresh your webpage. Make sure to clear your blogs cache if you have installed any caching plugin.
For Twenty Ten Theme
Twenty Ten theme uses a function call < ?php twentyten_posted_on(); ?> to display post date as well as author name.
So removing it from your single.php file would even remove “posted by author” info also.
So, you need to remove the date part from the functions.php file directly.
Log into your WordPress blog: Click on Edit under Appearance menu.
Click on functions.php file to edit it.
Scroll down to find this line of code:
printf( __( '<span class="%1$s">Posted on</span> %2$s
<span class="meta-sep">by</span> %3$s', 'twentyten' ),
Now remove the code which is responsible for generating “Posted on ” info. Now the code must look like:
printf( __( ' <span class="meta-sep">by</span> %3$s', 'twentyten' ),
Save the file and refresh your blog.
If you followed everything correctly, the Posted on (post_date) will now be removed.
To Remove or Not To Remove ?
People searching for the content often get frustrated to go through long enough only to know that its a old and out dated information 🙁
Sometimes they need to scroll down to the comment section to see the date of the first comment, to roughly know the post date.
If it’s a timeless content, then it’s always fine, but what if you are a news site and some kind of gossip site where knowing the post date might be important for the user.
In such cases, it’s not advisable to remove the date of publishing the article.
I have faced problems too.. I usually visit application development sites and read and try the coding so long only to know that the core software the post is talking about is years old and it doesn’t work any more 🙁
Such development site even fail to mention the software version etc details.
Advantages to the webmaster:
People coming to the site may think the content as still fresh and will continue reading.
These people are mainly the visitors coming from search engines, so he gets the advantage of getting more organic traffic. Google Adsense ads likes organic traffic! Once they know that this is not something they were looking for, they will start looking around and may click on a ad $
My Personal Take:
My advice would be to include the date, if you are writing a development blog or a news site where the articles are more or less time sensitive.
On the other hand, if you are writing timeless articles: you can well remove the date and time of posting the article.
These are my views. What you people think ?
