Date preview like facebook time ago using PHP

What is time ago?

Time Ago functionality is used to display time in a different format, so that we can:

Display the time format, which is easy to understand.
Display the time format similar to different time zone.
Show time interactively in messaging and feeds.

We can do it easily by a php function. In this function we will calculate time using particular country timezone. If you have previous date and time then in this function it count time difference between current date and time with previous date on simple php logic. We will convert the difference in time stamp and get number of seconds between these date and time. From seconds we can easily get minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.

Time ago function implementation:

<?php date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Dhaka'); // Set default timezone

 function facebook_time_ago($timestamp) {  
      $time_ago = strtotime($timestamp);  
      $current_time = time();  
      $time_difference = $current_time - $time_ago;   
      $seconds = $time_difference;  
      $minutes = round($seconds / 60 );           // value 60 is seconds  
      $hours = round($seconds / 3600);           //value 3600 is 60 minutes * 60 sec  
      $days = round($seconds / 86400);          //86400 = 24 * 60 * 60;  
      $weeks = round($seconds / 604800);       // 7*24*60*60;  
      $months = round($seconds / 2629440);    //((365+365+365+365+366)/5/12)*24*60*60  
      $years = round($seconds / 31553280);   //(365+365+365+365+366)/5 * 24 * 60 * 60  
      
	  if($seconds <= 60)  return "Just Now";  
 
      else if($minutes <=60) {  
		if($minutes==1)  return "A Min Ago";  
        else return "$minutes M Ago";  
		}  
     
      else if($hours <=24) {  
		if($hours==1) return "1 H Ago";  
        else return "$hours Hrs Ago";    
		} 
		
      else if($days <= 7) {
		$s_t=date("h:i A", strtotime($timestamp));
		if($days==1) return "Yesterday";  
		else return "$days D Ago";    
		}
		
      else if($weeks <= 4.3) {  
		$s_t=date("h:i A", strtotime($timestamp));
		if($weeks==1) return "Last Week";  
		else return "$weeks W Ago";    
		} 
		
       else if($months <12)  {  
		$s_t=date("h:i A", strtotime($timestamp));
		if($months==1) return "A Month Ago";  
        else return "$months M ago";    
		} 
		
		
		else  { 
			$s_d=date("M", strtotime($timestamp))." ".date("d", strtotime($timestamp)).", ".date("Y", strtotime($timestamp));
			$s_t=date("h:i A", strtotime($timestamp));
			return "$s_d at $s_t";    
		} 
 }

echo facebook_time_ago('2023-09-01 02:30:55'); // Calling Function to get output
?>

Download Sample Project Code