Several years agoConnections started out as just some tweaks to suit some personal needs to another plugin, “Little Black Book“, which itself was a tweaked version of “Addressbook“. One of those tweaks was adding the anniversary and birthday fields. On second thought, maybe it was just adding the option of inputting a second address. Either way, I didn’t bother with requiring a year because that info was rather difficult to get from individuals and it wasn’t necessary for my needs at the time. So, behind the scenes I just tacked on the year 1970 so I could covert it to a timestamp. Why 1970? Well, two reasons, just because and I wanted a shortcode that listed the upcoming anniversaries and birthdays. Using the current year messed with the sorting, so normalizing the year to 1970 worked.
Fast forward a few years…
A common request I receive from users is wanting to be able to add a year to both the anniversary and birthday fields as well as recording other life event dates such as Certification, Membership, Graduate High School and Graduate College. The upcoming release of Connections can do both! There is now a new Date meta field which looks like and functions like the other meta fields. The input field for the date uses the jQuery UI Datepicker plugin that is bundled with WordPress and is themed to match the WordPress style for a seamless experience.
There is one gotcha. Remember, there was no year saved and the year was normalized to 1970. I needed a year for everything to work, well, that didn’t leave many choices. If you ever used the [[upcoming_list]] Connections shortcode and used the format option to show the year, you never would see 1970. How is that? Well, based on the date, month and day, if the date was already in the past the following year would be shown and if month and day was still in the future, the current year was shown. To maintain consistency, this is what will happen until one of two scenarios occur, you add the actual year or when you update the entry for any reason the year shown at the time of the update is what will be saved.
Please expose the new dates feature to Organization entries also. We would use it to track membership expiration.
@Dan Dzina
Yes, they will be exposed to the Organization entry type.
Anxious for this feature — any guestimate on when we might see an update?
@Dan Dzina
I’m still pushing to try to get this out before the end of June … but honestly it’s may get pushed to July.
Sounds great! However, some folks still may not want to list a year for birthdays so can you work on at least having the option to show or not show the date, or anydate; even though you need to add the year field to make it work properly perhaps? Thanks for working on it.. It’s a wonderful template overall.
@Ms.Harris
By default, all current templates do not show a year. I do no plan on changing that. However, going forward, a year will be required.
When can we expect the new version with the year included?
@Marc
My self imposed deadline was the end of June to which I missed. Currently I’m looking at September.