Hide Author By-Line if After Certain Date

Question

I'm trying to use functions.php to hide the by-line on posts after a certain date. I'm using the following code but it isn't working. I think it's due to not properly grabbing the post date. How do I get the post date in functions.php?

// Hide By-Line

add_action('wp_head','my_head_css');
function my_head_css(){

$excludeDate = date("2021-06-02");
$postDate = get_the_date('Y-m-d');

if($postDate > $excludeDate){

    echo "<style> .entry-author {display:none !important;} </style>";
    
    }
}

Answer 1

It's probably getting the date as you expect, but the > is essentially a mathematical operator and you're trying to use it to compare two strings.

You can use strtotime() to convert the dates to integers (# of seconds elapsed since 1970-01-01), and compare those.

// Hide By-Line

add_action('wp_head','my_head_css');
function my_head_css(){

$excludeDate = date("2021-06-02");
$postDate = get_the_date('Y-m-d');

if( strtotime( $postDate ) > strtotime( $excludeDate ) ){

    echo "<style> .entry-author {display:none !important;} </style>";
    
    }
}