Weston Ruter: Post Date Block: Published & Modified

I’ve had an itch I’ve wanted to scratch for a while. A year ago, I re-developed my blog here to use the Twenty Twenty-Five block theme replacing the Twenty Twenty classic theme. Something I wanted to do was show a post’s published date followed by the modified date if it differed. For example, for WCUS 2024 I published My Portland Picks to share my favorite things to do in the city. Since WCUS 2025 was also in Portland last year, I updated the post with my latest picks. To make it clear it had been changed, I manually added a “Post updated for 2025” paragraph at the beginning of the post. But I wanted to avoid having to keep doing this for such evergreen content.

There are two blocks listed in the block inserter for dates: Date and Modified Date. (Previously these block names started with “Post” but these were removed in WordPress 6.4.) In reality, these two blocks are just variations of the one Date block. You could turn a Date block into a Modified Date block by enabling this block setting:

With block bindings in WordPress 6.9, the Date block became further abstracted to be able to represent any date, not just a post’s publish date or modified date. When a Date block is inserted, you can now decide to bind the block to either of these dates:

The key word there is “either”. The setting I was looking for was missing: the ability to display the publish date and the modified date (if it differs).

I did find Gutenberg issue #53099 opened by Carolina Nymark where she was reporting that it was confusing that the old “display modified date” toggle actually causes the modified date to be displayed instead of the publish date:

The info I was looking for was whether, when toggled on, it would display both the published and modified dates, or display the modified date instead of the published date, as from the settings alone it’s not immediately clear

Commenting on that issue, Ronnie Burt said:

Feedback after using this block on multiple sites in templates for both posts and pages. The ‘modified date’ block doesn’t show anything if the post has never been updated. This makes it really challenging to use, as there will be a blank spot on the front end for new posts or pages without any edits.
It would be more useful to show the date published if the post has no edits.

Carolina responded:

The problem is that there is no one scenario that will work for all use cases. Some users and designs wants to display both the original publishing date and the modified date. So no matter how this block is updated, it will break for someone.
Your best option may be to register a block binding with a callback function that displays the post date, to get the exact conditions that you need, and then insert a paragraph with this block binding, instead of using the post date block.

A few months later, when I discovered the issue, I commented:

To me it seems like the block should facilitate showing the published date and then also show the modified date if it is different, with a prefix like “Updated: ” or some other parenthetical treatment. I don’t think the modified date should ever take over the published date. I’m not sure the best way to achieve that other than by adding a plugin which filters the Date block to append the desired content. I’m not sure how that could be handled in the UI, given we’re dealing with inline content and there is no ability to hide blocks (cf. #50756), and there’d have to be a condition like “Only show this block if the rendered date/time of the published date is not the same as the rendered date/time of the modified date.”

So this is what I wanted, but the Date block didn’t support it. So I started exploring something that would implement my desired use case.

Accounting for all the different scenarios adds complexity to the block. Rendering a single publish date or modified date is simple enough. But if the modified date needs to be displayed conditionally then how is this configured in the editor? Namely, if both dates are displayed, then one or both of the dates would need to have some prefix indicating what the date refers to. The two configurations I had in mind were prefixing the modified date only:

December 25, 2025 (Modified: January 1, 2026)

Or else putting each on a separate line and having prefixes for each:

Published: December 25, 2025
Modified: January 1, 2026

There is an existing Gutenberg issue #61920 which is about adding prefixes and suffixes to the block similarly to the Categories block. But these prefixes are unconditional for only a single date. I wanted these prefixes added conditionally for when the modified date is displayed in addition to the published date.

A New Plugin

Ultimately, I put together a plugin to implement what I wanted: Post Date Block: Published & Modified. It’s currently on GitHub but I’ve also submitted it to the WordPress.org directory.

Once active, when you are editing the settings for the Date block for the Post Date variation, a new “With Modified Date” panel appears. Inside that panel there is a new toggle:

Show modified date when different from published date

The two dates are rendered in the supplied date format, and only if they then differ will the modified date be displayed after the published date. This prevents the modified date from appearing as a duplicate when the post is updated on the same day it was published.

When that toggle is enabled, two new sets of fields are presented for adding a prefix and suffix to both the published date and the modified date. There is also a toggle for whether the modified date should be displayed on a separate line. Here are the settings for the two configurations I mentioned previously, one where the modified date is displayed on a separate line and another where it is displayed on the same line:

In terms of the frontend rendering, here’s what the Date markup looks like right after publishing on Christmas:

<div class="wp-block-post-date">
	<time datetime="2025-12-25T18:14:21-08:00">
		December 25, 2025
	</time>
</div>

And here is how the block is rendered after having been modified on New Year’s Day, in the two-line configuration:

<div class="wp-block-post-date post-date-modified">
	Published:
	<time class="entry-date published" datetime="2025-12-25T18:14:21-08:00">
		December 25, 2025
	</time>
	<br>
	<span class="modified">
		Modified:
		<time class="updated" datetime="2026-01-01T21:20:05-08:00">
			January 1, 2026
		</time>
	</span>
</div>

Note the added microformat classes to disambiguate the published date from the modified date. I was really happy to be able to leverage the HTML Tag Processor to handle insertion of the prefixes, suffixes, newline, and class names!

This plugin solves my use case, but it’s primarily a prototype/stopgap until something lands in core. The user experience for this doesn’t feel ideal, but I can’t think of a better option at the moment. Note also that there is currently no preview in the editor, so you have to save the changes and go to the frontend to see the results. (My Customizer self weeps.) I didn’t want to fork the Date block’s edit function to implement full preview in the editor, and it would be of little value anyway since when editing a block template the Date block now just shows ”Invalid date” anyway due to there being no post context for the block binding.

The Future

The ideal solution perhaps would involve Bits (now Shortblocks). Maybe the default view for a Post Date block when editing a block template would be to show the view when the modified date is the same as the published date. But then there could potentially be a popover that could allow configuring how the block should render when the modified date is different. With Shortblocks, these tokens could be inserted inline with the content and moved around inside of a paragraph block. This would avoid the need to supply a suffix/prefix in the detached block settings sidebar.

In the meantime, I hope my plugin is helpful for keeping your readers updated!

Where I’ve posted about this: