Thread

Seems like a simple thing to do but I can’t figure it out:

I have a summary page of blog posts, each of which has a ‘leave a comment’ link to the post’s detail page view where the comment form is. However, if the author of the post sets the Comment Expiration Date to some date and we roll past that date, I’d like to hide the ‘leave a comment’ link.

So the question is, how can I check for that date in the looping channel entries tag? I know there is a ‘comments_expired’ conditional that can be used in the comment form tag pair but that doesn’t help me on the summary page.

I cannot find any variable to check this from the actual entry. Surely there must be one…?!

Thanks,
Mike

Actually, I think you’re right, there isn’t one within the entries loop according to the docs - but I wonder if it might actually be there just the same.  In the Safecracker documentation, several examples actually use “comment_expiration_date” as a variable.  So perhaps there is one but it’s not listed as a variable in the channel entries loop docs.  I haven’t tried it, but if that rings true, then all you should have to do is a simple comparison between that variable and the current time variable.

Oh, and if that actually is a variable you can draw from, you may actually need to first do a check to see if it has a value before doing the conditional comparison.  Otherwise you could get unpredictable behaviour with a blank field being compared to current_time.

Thanks for the feedback John. We had tried that variable but got nothing back (it didn’t even parse). But we were applying a format parameter. I just tried it again without a format parameter and it seems to work - it looks like it spits out Unix time. Cool.

Someone should probably update the User Guide with this.

Glad it helped, Coalescent.  And yes, I agree, the variable should at least be mentioned as available in the docs.  Curious that it doesn’t accept the format parameter.  At least you got it working!