My intended goal is to have it see if the post allows comments and if it does then check to make sure the date_comments_expires is NOT before the passed day. I'm not quite sure how to finish this if statement. Any help?
if ($mainNews[0]['allow_comments'] == 'Yes' AND $mainNews[0]['date_comments_expire'] == ) {
EDIT:
Here's my updated code in which I'm getting a call to member function getTimeStamp of non object
if ($mainNews[0]['allow_comments'] == 'Yes' AND $mainNews[0]['date_comments_expire']->getTimestamp() > time() ) {
echo "<a href=\"#\"></a><span>".$mainNews[0]['number_of_comments']."</span>";
}
This depends entirely on what is contained within the date_comments_expire index of your array. I would expect it to either be a unix timestamp stating when the comments expire, or a reasonable textual interpretation thereof.
If you're using a unix timestamp, then you're doing great. If it's text, then you're going to need to convert it into a unix timestamp before continuing. The best function for this is strtotime(). It can parse a variety of textual datetime representations, and will return a unix timestamp as a result.
Once you have the endpoint represented as a timestamp, you can compare it against the current time. For this, you can use the time() function, which returns the current time as a unix timestamps.
Since unix timestamps are just integers (specifically, the number of seconds since Jan. 1, 1970), this is a simple comparison.
In the end, your code would look like this:
// convert to timestamp if necessary, remove if unneeded
$commentExpiry == strtotime($mainNews[0]['date_comments_expire']);
if ($mainNews[0]['allow_comments'] == 'Yes' AND
$commentExpiry > time()) {
//submit comments
} else {
//error handling
}