KB Countdown Widget

Ever wanted to track a pregnancy, or the time until the next elections, or your baby’s precise age, or something else that will surely fascinate all your readers? Maybe you even wanted a cool bargraph showing how far you’ve progressed between two dates? Introducing KB Countdown, which does just that. You give it a start date, an end date, or both. You then write in a message like this:

Janelle will have the baby in TIME_UNTIL!

In your sidebar (or anywhere else you choose to put it), visitors see this:

Janelle will have the baby in 3 months and 4 days!

You can use a single date, or you can read dates in automatically from an iCal file. Years, months, and days will automatically show up as either singular or plural (in any language, not just in English).

Though there are a few other count down plugins out there, KB Countdown was created to give you much greater control over how your counter looks. It also lets you count either up or down. You can see examples in the sidebar at the KB Countdown plugin page.

This plugin was originally only a widget, but can now be used either as a widget, in a page/post, or anywhere in your template. For non-widget uses, see instructions in the download. For widget uses, you need to be using either WP v2.2+ or the WordPress sidebar widgets plugin.

Basic Features

• You can use the time tags (like TIME_UNTIL and TIME_SINCE) in either the widget’s title or in its text.
• Use iCal data (e.g. Google Calendar) if you want
• Easy to localize (i.e. use on non-English sites).
• As with the RSS and text widgets, you can have up to 9 KB Countdown widgets. (If you are using the plugin in your template or in a page/post, you can have an unlimited number of countdowns.)
• You can customize the width, height, border size, and colors of the bargraph (if you choose to use one).
• You can track any date within 2,147,483,648 years of today. To use bargraphs, your dates must be no more than 2,147,483,648 years apart. Probably not a problem unless you’re a paleogeologist.
• Standard tags you can use: TIME_UNTIL, TIME_SINCE, PERCENT_DONE, BARGRAPH.
• Safe for WP-MU installations. Users cannot put script or anything into their message; their countdown message is scrubbed the same way that text widgets are.

Support

Be advised: If you post your support questions as comments below, I probably won’t see them. If the FAQs don’t answer your question, you can post support questions at the KB Countdown plugin page on my site.