Change Published Date to Last Updated Date

I recently watched the Evergreen Content Wabinar by Jay - great Wabinar by the way and you should definitely check this out.

In the Wabinar Jay suggests making evergreen content pages rather than posts so that there is no date stamp on it. Makes sense.

The Issue

However, I turn off social shares on my pages (due to the way I have customized my home page) so when I published my latest evergreen content as a page it had no option to share socially - which I wanted. So I deleted the page and posted as a post.

I then thought that maybe I can find a plugin that removed the date stamp from only some posts. These might exist - but I found something better before I got there!

The Solution

I found this post by WPBeginner:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/why-you-should-not-remove-dates-from-your-wordpress-blog-posts/comment-page-2/#comment-261076

And it was exactly what I was looking for. I update a lot of my posts regularly and I was always uneasy with the date showing being the published date - as I knew down the track that this was going to make the content look outdated. So this seems like the perfect solution.

Not only is the date on all of my evergreen content updated (and I improve/update it regularly) whenever I make an update so to are all of the posts that I make updates for.

How to Use Last Updated On instead of Published On

I think there are a couple of plugins that can do this. So if you want to do this too you should be able to find something to do that - or find some code to add to your functions.php if you are more confident with code.

I added code to mine but it is code specific to Genesis framework themes. For those on the Genesis framework there is a link below to the code that I used.

http://www.engagewp.com/display-updated-date-instead-of-published-date-in-genesis/

You leave out the:

<?php//* mind this opening php tag

Or at least I did and it worked for me.

I made a couple of modifications to this code because it was displaying on my posts as "Updated: April 4, 2015 Nate" but I wanted it to say "Last Updated: April 4, 2015 by Nate" because I thought that looked nicer. I simply added "Last" in front of "Updated" in the code and then just after the </time> closing tag I added in the "by".

Viola!

Remember that this code is Genesis Framework specific but I'm sure if you research you can find code or a plugin to do this for your site.

Is this something you would consider doing for your site? Why? Why not?

Thanks for reading!

NB: Note that with this particular code it will still read "Published on:" for any posts that haven't been updated since the date of publishing.