Yesterday evening my wife discovered by experimentation how to easily remove dates from WordPress posts without editing the theme files and without using a WordPress plugin. Otherwise known as dateless posts, it can sometimes be useful to create your blog without dates on any of the posts. Yes you could use pages exclusively, but sometimes that’s just not what you want.
We’d first tried to do it with a plugin that was supposed to remove dates, but it was an old plugin and didn’t work with the themes we were using, so I’d sort of resigned myself to editing the theme to remove them, but I only wanted to do that as a last resort because if the theme got updated, any customisation is usually lost.
So last night my wife sat quietly fiddling with one of her blogs and found the answer. Well, at least for the theme she was using – SemioLogic Pro – the same theme I use on this site. I’ve tried it with a couple of other themes and it didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean to say it won’t work for you either now or in the future if the WordPress developers decide to change things a little.
What she did was perfectly logical and easily overlooked. Go to Settings-General and scroll down to Date Format. Select the Custom radio button and delete the contents of the box next to it – you may also have to do it with the time too – and click Save Changes.
Ta-daa!
No more dates on posts.
Not ideal if you want some posts to show dates and others not, and as I said it doesn’t work with every theme, but I know that at least some people will find this useful. Hopefully someone will eventually write a plugin that does this properly with post level control, but until then we have to use workarounds like this.
-Frank Haywood
