1. do you want to countdown to a specific date/time, or just have the countdown be unique for each visit?
both
That’s not how time works. Let me explain. New Years Day is on a certain date and time. So if a countdown is set up to count down to New Years Day, it will start at a different time each time the site is visited. This is because we are time traveling at a constant rate and direction (forward, by the way). If however, you say you want a countdown for 11 minutes from NOW… well this will always start at 00:10:59 and works it’s way down… however when the page is refreshed… the ‘when is now’ time would be updated and the countdown would once again start from 10 minutes 59 seconds. Fun fact: in the New Years example above, setting a target date/time for 2018-12-31 23:59:59 (or more like 2019-01-01 00:00:00)… this would be based on the TIMEZONE setting of your WordPress. So even if it’s New Years in Tokyo or Sydney, places that live in the future… it still takes time (up to 23 hours for some parts of the world) for New Years to trigger the further west from the International Date Line. All fascinating stuff, actually.
Using the shortcode you can do something like this for New Years:
[tminus t="2019-01-01 00:00:00" omitweeks="true"/]
These options are also in the widget, just use the ISO date and time format of:
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS and you should be golden. You can also turn off (or omit) weeks globally in the plugin settings under the Dashboard > Settings > Collapse-O-Matic > Omit Weeks
If you wanted to countdown to 5 mintues from now, this would be done using something like:
[tminus t="+5 minutes"/]
Hope that helps clear somethings up for you.
Keep in mind, if you want a recurring countdown, you want to upgrade to T(-) Countdown Control. It offers some advanced time scheduling abilities, but the best part it is comes with a very high level of personal support. We’ll even set up the initial scheduling for you if you like.
