No dates before 1969?

It would be funny though to have the first post in your blog dated as your actual birthday, the very beginning of it all.
Except in my case this isn’t possible ?? -> 1963 (sigh…)

No, I wasn’t blogging in the 1500’s – I was just experimenting. I can change the dates to something equally silly in the future, but for the record this is a feature MT has and WP doesn’t. See https://jemimap.freeshell.org/moveablecolor/ – the month names are in Portuguese, which was as close as I could get to Latin in MT.

Haven’t been around these forums lately, was wondering if anyone else was worried about UNIX epoch. A little while back, I wrote a work-around for WP 1.0 that used and open source library of time calculations (adodb, I think?), and it seemed (on the surface) to work OK. This wasn’t too hard because WP stores the data-time field as a date data type in the DB, so no information is lost! Other tools are *much* harder to hack because they store them as integers – specifically int(10)’s. There were 5 or 6 places that needed modification, most calls went through a common set of time utilities. Not sure if this is still the case.
Why would someone want to do this? Not necessarily in a traditional blog, but I’ve run into historical societies, museums, etc., that want bios and “timelines” that are sortable, searchable and inter-related. With categories, profiles and “blogs”, you can do a lot of cool stuff!

Pepys Diary runs on MT and uses dates from the 17th century, so if they wanted to switch to WP they couldn’t. ??
Out of interest is there any limitation on how far in the future you can post?

It should be a very easy hack to translate the output of the date tag.

Here’s the short doc at the top of the adodb code:
PHP native date functions use integer timestamps for computations.
Because of this, dates are restricted to the years 1901-2038 on Unix
and 1970-2038 on Windows due to integer overflow for dates beyond
those years. This library overcomes these limitations by replacing the
native function’s signed integers (normally 32-bits) with PHP floating
point numbers (normally 64-bits).
Dates from 100 A.D. to 3000 A.D. and later
have been tested. The minimum is 100 A.D. as <100 will invoke the
2 => 4 digit year conversion. The maximum is billions of years in the
future, but this is a theoretical limit as the computation of that year
would take too long with the current implementation of adodb_mktime().
————————————————————————————
Technically, the db field itself should port into the WP db from MT. But the time functions, like mktime() are the problem. On 1.0x, I made a few changes to “functions.inc” and “template-functions.inc”, but they got broken out further in 1.2. There’s also some localization decisions you will have to make (like if you enter a date prior to 1884, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, as GMT was only established in 10/1884 ).
And there are a other years that are affected by when the country in question adopted the Gregorian Calendar (affecting the month list and back/next keys).
If you look at Pepys Diary on the archive page, you’ll see that they list the years as “1659/60” to indicate that in England pre 1752, the new years was in March, dispite other Catholic countries of Europe having standardized on January 1 in 1622.
Just some trivia for the time-weary public! I’m working with another “community freeware” tool right now but I can say that the WP 1.0 was very easy to hack and took only a few hours to change and test.

I wish someone would fix (er… hack) this on WordPress 1.5 to make it display dates before 1969.

I’ve just started creating a WP1.5 blog based on my grandmother’s diaries for 1940 and 1941 and ran into this problem – just wondered whether anyone had … er, fixed this yet? Or could offer me any helpful suggestions?

You can try these instructions (note the use at your own risk disclaimer):

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/27367#post-194153