Demo Download

Time Ago Function is a function that is commonly used to display time in human understandable format, as you have seen many times on social networks, whenever you post any status on your Facebook, Twitter or any other network, it says posted few seconds ago, 1 min ago, 1 hour age, etc. This is actually done by subtracting the current time from the post published time.

For this purpose we need to store a date in database, date should be in MySQL standard date and time format (“Y-m-d H:i:s”).

Lets create a database with name register.

CREATE DATABASE register;

Create a table with name time_table with column id and trn_date.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `time_table` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `trn_date` datetime NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
 );

After creating the above table, you need to insert a record, or I have attached SQL file if you can import that SQL file so it is better because it will already have data in table.

Now create php file with the following code:

<?php
//Creating Function
function TimeAgo ($oldTime, $newTime) {
$timeCalc = strtotime($newTime) - strtotime($oldTime);
if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*24*30*12*2)){
	$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60/24/30/12) . " years ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*24*30*12)){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60/24/30/12) . " year ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*24*30*2)){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60/24/30) . " months ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*24*30)){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60/24/30) . " month ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*24*2)){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60/24) . " days ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*24)){
		$timeCalc = " Yesterday";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60*2)){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60) . " hours ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= (60*60)){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60/60) . " hour ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= 60*2){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60) . " minutes ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc >= 60){
		$timeCalc = intval($timeCalc/60) . " minute ago";
	}else if ($timeCalc > 0){
		$timeCalc .= " seconds ago";
	}
return $timeCalc;
}

//Connecting Database
$connection = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '');
if (!$connection){
	die("Database Connection Failed" . mysql_error());
	}
$select_db = mysql_select_db('register');
if (!$select_db){
	die("Database Selection Failed" . mysql_error());
	}
$query_time="Select * from time_table where id=1";
$result_time = mysql_query($query_time);
$row_time = mysql_fetch_array($result_time);
$date = $row_time['trn_date'];

echo TimeAgo($date, date("Y-m-d H:i:s"));
?>

Note: In the above code first I created a function to calculate posted time and then I used mysql_connect() function, you will need to provide your database username and password, then I simply echo time ago function with parameters.

Update: Try to use mysqli instead of mysql, this is old tutorial therefore I used mysql in it.

Demo Download

If you have any issue with this tutorial so let me know in the below comments section.

Facebook Official Page: All PHP Tricks

Twitter Official Page: All PHP Tricks