Peter's Useful Crap

This was the first php script that I ever looked up sooooo many years ago. It’s really quite simple. You want to show visitors a countdown in days to a certain event in the future. Since PHP can provide the current time on the server to the very second, simply calculate the desired date (in seconds) and subtract from the server date. More complicated scripts can give a choice between hours, months, or days remaining, can compensate for a server time different than your current time, and can probably dress up the output a bit better.

I’ve spiced this code up a bit by making it a function (thus enhancing reusability), but otherwise, let’s go with simple, shall we?

Here’s the code:

<?
function countdown($event,$month,$day,$year) {
// subtract desired date from current date and give an answer in terms of days
$remain = ceil((mktime(0,0,0,$month,$day,$year) - time()) / 86400);
// show the number of days left
if ($remain > 0) {
print "<p><strong>$remain</strong> more sleeps until $event</p>";
}
// if the event has arrived, say so!
else {
print "<p>$event has arrived!</p>";
}
}

// call the function
countdown("Christmas Day", 12, 25, 2008);
?>

Here’s the output:

Christmas Day has arrived!

How about some more fun:

Update: I have since made a countdown plugin for Wordpress that incorporates the basic concept.

This entry was originally posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 11:59 am and is filed under PHP, CSS, JavaScript tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.