How to Customize and Theme Post & Date info in Drupal 6

When I was theming my blog in Drupal, I decided I wanted a better way to customize and display post info such as wording used and the way date was displayed. The first step is to have a look around and see where the code is coming from that renders this info. I viewed the files in my custom theme folder and discovered these few lines of code in node.tpl.php

<?php if ($submitted): ?>

    <span class="submitted"><?php print $submitted ?></span>

<?php endif; ?>

In HTML, that is rendered as:

Submitted by Danny Englander on 4-01-10

I decided I wanted to have customized date and post info only for my blog so a standard Drupal convention allows you to have node-blog.tpl.php to tailor the display of the blog content type. My theme did not have this file so I simply copied node.tpl.php and renamed it. Now that I had my custom Node Blog template file, I was all set to start customizing date and post info.

Well, the above code seemed boring and hard to theme in Drupal so I discovered a way to be more specific with the way the code that displays post and date info gets output in your Drupal theme.

I simply replaced the code above with this code:

<div class="meta post-info">
<?php if ($submitted): ?>
<span class="submitted">Posted by <?php print theme('username', $node) ?></span>
  <?php endif; ?>

<div class="dateblock">
      <span class="month"><?php print $date_month ?></span>
      <span class="day"><?php print $date_day ?></span>
      <span class="year"><?php print $date_year ?></span>
 </div><!--//end dateblock-->
</div><!--//end meta post-info-->

**Note this crucial bit of code below was left out of the original post so if this did not work for you that's why. Place the code below in your theme's template.php file or create one if you don't have one already. (change "mytheme" to the name of your theme):

function mytheme_preprocess_node(&$vars) {
  // Grab the node object.
  $node = $vars['node'];
  // Make individual variables for the parts of the date.
  $vars['date_day'] = format_date($node->created, 'custom', 'j');
$vars['date_month'] = format_date($node->created, 'custom', 'M');
$vars['date_year'] = format_date($node->created, 'custom', 'Y');
}

By breaking down and getting more specific with this code, I was now able to use some CSS to customize the date into the nice little square blocks you see to the left of every post title. It also allows to have "Posted by", "submitted by" or whatever other wording you choose for the author part of the code.