How To Create a dynamic year of experience

This step-by-step tutorial on how to display an automatically updating years of experience badge on your WordPress site.

Create a PHP Function

The first step is to write a PHP function that calculates the number of years that have passed since a given date. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll use August 1, 2010, as the start date.

Add the following PHP function to your functions.php file in your WordPress theme, or use a plugin like Code Snippets to insert the code:

function years_since_2010() {
    $today = new DateTime();
    $start_date = new DateTime('2010-08-01');
    $diff = $today->diff($start_date);
    return $diff->y; // returns the years difference
}

add_filter( 'bricks/code/echo_function_names', function() {
  return [
    'years_since_2010',
  ];
} );

Understanding the code

• We initialize two DateTime objects—$today represents the current date, while $start_date is set to August 1, 2010.
• By calling the diff method on the $today object and passing the $start_dateobject, we calculate the time difference.
• Finally, $diff->y extracts the year portion from the difference, which we return from the years_since_2010 function.

Implementing the Function in Your Design

Once you have added the function, proceed to your page design, and within your editor (for this tutorial, we’ll be using the Bricks Editor), select the element where you want to display the years of experience.

Insert 

{echo:years_since_2010}

in the relevant field to output the result of our years_since_2010 function.

Whitelisting Your Function

For the dynamically generated badge to work properly, we’ll need to whitelist our function in Bricks. This is a security measure that allows the function to be called from within the Bricks template.

Add this PHP snippet to your functions.php file or your code snippet tool:

add_filter( 'bricks/code/echo_function_names', function() {
  return [
    'years_since_2010',
  ];
} );

After completing the steps above, check your website’s front-end display. The element you edited should now be showing the number of years since August 1, 2010. As time progresses, this badge will automatically update each year to reflect the correct number of years of experience.