Apr 04

HOW-TO: Schedule content display with PHP

PHP No Comments »


Recently a client of mine asked that a hyperlinked advertisement be displayed on a sidebar in her website until a specific date and time. You can adapt your code to display content in your web site based on the following.

First off you will of course need to be able to use PHP to run this in your site.

STEP 1. - Determine where in your code you want the scheduled content to be displayed and open a set of PHP tags.

<?PHP

STEP 2. - Create a variable that will give you a datestamp. As of the time of this writing if I were to echo out $date you would get 20080401120235.

$date = date("YmdHis");

STEP 3. - Create a variable for the date that you want to stop displaying the time sensitive content. The following variable is a datestamp that equates to 05/19/2008 00:00:01. 

$stop = "20080519000001";

STEP 4. - Now to keep this simple you can create an IF statement that compares $date and $stop. If $date is less than $stop then echo the following code.

if ($date <= $stop){						
	echo 'Display until 05/19/2008 00:00:01';
}

STEP 5. - Close your PHP tag.

?>

Complete code:

<?PHP
$date = date("YmdHis");
$stop = "20080519000001";
if ($date <= $stop){						
	echo 'Display until 05/19/2008 00:00:01';
}
?>

If you decide that you want to begin displaying the code on a certain date and end it on a certain date you could do something like this:

<?PHP
$date = date("YmdHis");
$begin = "20080518000001";
$stop = "20080519000001";
if ($date >= $begin && $date <= $stop){						
	echo 'Display until 05/19/2008 00:00:01';
}
?>

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