This Article will help to display date/time difference like orkut, twitter, FB,. The code snippet i have written is to show date/time difference between current and stored date-time from database. I did  check most of web for a similar function, got lots and then finally created an optimized version for a specific requirement. I wrote a PHP function which returns date difference in number of years, days, hours and even seconds.

Every bit of time is valuable, so i didn’t want to lose any second .

Output of function will be like ,

’5 days before’, ’2 months, 3 days before, ’2 hour before’

Following is the source code,

[php]
function diffofdate($d1, $d2){
$d1 = (is_string($d1) ? strtotime($d1) : $d1);
$d2 = (is_string($d2) ? strtotime($d2) : $d2);

$diff_secs = abs($d1 – $d2);
$base_year = min(date("Y", $d1), date("Y", $d2));

$diff = mktime(0, 0, $diff_secs, 1, 1, $base_year);
$displaydate = "";
if(date("Y", $diff) – $base_year > 0)
{
$displaydate = (date("Y", $diff) – $base_year) . " year";
if(date("Y", $diff) – $base_year> 1)$displaydate .= "s";
if(date("n", $diff) – 1 > 0)
$displaydate .= ", " . (date("n", $diff) – 1) . " month";
if((date("n", $diff) – 1) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
$displaydate .= " before";
}
else if(date("n", $diff) – 1 > 0)
{
$displaydate .= (string)(date("n", $diff) – 1) . " month";
if((date("n", $diff) – 1) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
if(date("j", $diff) – 1 > 0)
$displaydate .= ", " . (date("j", $diff) – 1) . " day";
if((date("j", $diff) – 1) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
$displaydate .= " before";
}
else if(date("j", $diff) – 1 > 0)
{
$displaydate .= (string)(date("j", $diff) – 1) . " day";
if((date("j", $diff) – 1) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
if((int) date("G", $diff) > 0)
$displaydate .= ", " . date("G", $diff) . " hour";
if(date("G", $diff) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
$displaydate .= " before";
}
else if((int) date("G", $diff) > 0)
{
$displaydate .= (string)(date("G", $diff)). " hour";
if(date("G", $diff) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
if((int) date("i", $diff) > 0)
$displaydate .= ", " . date("i", $diff) . " minute";
if(date("i", $diff) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
$displaydate .= " before";
}
else if((int) date("i", $diff) > 0){
$displaydate .= date("i", $diff) . " minute";
if(date("i", $diff) > 1)$displaydate .= "s";
$displaydate .= " ago"
}
else if((int) date("s", $diff) > 0){
$displaydate .= date("s", $diff) . " second";
if(date("s", $diff) > 1)
$displaydate .= "s";$displaydate .= " ago";
}
else $displaydate = "A moment ago.";
return $displaydate;
}[/php]

So when we call the above function we need to call diffofdate(date('Y-m-d H:i:s'),$dates) where $date is the one we stored earlier which is in the format as current date (date(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’)).

Issues will come if you have a web-farm scenario with multiple webservere in different geo-location. In those scenarios we need to store the timezone Offset as well or store UTC time.

Feel free to ping me for any clarification.