Last Updated Column

A lightweight WordPress plugin that adds a sortable "Last Updated" column to the Posts admin screen.

When you maintain a large archive of articles, knowing when each post was last modified is essential — especially for SEO housekeeping and content refresh workflows. This plugin surfaces WordPress's built-in post_modified timestamp directly in the Posts list table and lets you sort by it, so the posts most in need of attention are only one click away.

Features

• Adds a Last Updated column to the Posts (post) admin list table.
• Displays each post's last modification date and time (from post_modified).
• Column is sortable — click the header to order posts by when they were last updated.
• Localized column label, with translations bundled for:
  • English (en_US)
  • Swedish (sv_SE)
  • Spanish (es_ES)
  • Portuguese (pt_PT)
  • French (fr_FR)
  • German (de_DE)
• No configuration, no settings page, no database changes — activate and it works.

Requirements

• WordPress (uses the standard admin-column hooks manage_posts_columns, manage_posts_custom_column, and manage_edit-post_sortable_columns).
• PHP 5.x or later (no version-specific syntax is used).

No explicit Requires at least / Requires PHP headers are declared in the plugin, so treat the above as practical minimums.

Installation

From the ZIP (no coding required):

1. Download last-updated-column.php.zip from this repository.
2. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the ZIP file and click Install Now.
4. Click Activate.

Manual install:

1. Copy last-updated-column.php and the languages/ folder into a new directory under wp-content/plugins/last-updated-column/.
2. Activate Last Updated Column from the Plugins screen.

Usage

Once activated, open Posts in the WordPress admin. A new Last Updated column appears alongside the existing columns, showing each post's last modification timestamp. Click the column header to sort ascending or descending.

The column applies to the standard Posts post type. Pages and custom post types are not affected.

Localization

Translations live in the languages/ directory as .po / .mo files under the wpse-last-updated-column text domain and are loaded on plugins_loaded. WordPress automatically picks the file matching your site's language. To add a new language, create a matching wpse-last-updated-column-<locale>.po, compile it to .mo, and drop both into languages/.

Status

Stable at version 1.0 and functional in production. The scope is intentionally minimal — it does one thing well. The initial code was drafted with the help of AI (ChatGPT) and then refined; the original prompts used are preserved in the project's git history for transparency.

License

The plugin header declares GPL2. No standalone LICENSE file is currently included in the repository — adding a full GPL-2.0 license text would make the licensing explicit.

Author

Cornelii Sandberg

• Email: corresandberg@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cornelii