On several occasions, you may find yourself opening a page/post in WordPress to find out when it was recently modified. While WordPress displays a date “ Last modification for drafts, once this item has been published, the only date that is displayed is the date of publication regardless of any changes you make later.

Although the date of publication and the author are useful information (and often necessary), sites with a larger editorial process and multiple people involved may need a little more information.

Even though data are usually available in the individual article editor, it can be difficult to tell at a glance what was updated, when it was done, and by whom.

In this tutorial, I will therefore show you how to display the modification date of an already published article in two ways (with and without plugin).

How to display the publication date of an article with a plugin

This method is quite simple, because the only thing it requires of you is to install a WordPress Plugin. This is the plug-in " Last Modified TimeStamp ”, which you will find on WordPress.org. Check out our tutorial on installing WordPress Plugin.

Last modified timestamp wordpress plugin

Once you have installed the plugin, it will not need any configuration and will accomplish the following tasks:

Will display a new column on posts/pages to show the date of publication.

Will show a new section in the post/page edit to show the last modified date.

Wordpress post modification date

All you have to do is check the list of posts/pages to see the new column that has been added.

How to display the modification date of an article manually

The functions below will add an additional column for posts and/or page columns to display the last modified date of an entry.

The only real difference is the label in the " hook "" add_action for posts and pages that are treated differently. In addition, the calling functions of data columns are separated because different functions are needed for hierarchical and non-hierarchical publication formats.

In a previous tutorial, we showed you how to create a WordPress Plugin. All you will have to do is add the following code into your plugin.

We offer you a code for the articles and for the pages.

1 – For items

'; echo ' '.$modified.' '; echo 'by '.$user_info->display_name.' '; echo ' '; break; // end all case breaks } } function rkv_post_columns_display( $columns ) { $columns['modified'] = 'Last Modified'; return $columns; }

2 – For pages

'; echo ' '.$modified.' '; echo 'by '.$user_info->display_name.' '; echo ' '; break; // end all case breaks } } function rkv_page_columns( $columns ) { $columns['modified'] = 'Last Modified'; return $columns; }

All you have to do is check out the pages and posts to see your code in action. Unfortunately, this code does not display a section in the post/page edit to see the modification date of an entry.

That's all for this tutorial, feel free to share it with your friends on your favorite social networks.