Display the Last Modified Date in Joomla Articles

A tutorial you rewrote last month still reads as if it dates from 2019, because the only date on the page is the publish date. Joomla can show the modified date in the details block at the top, in the same format as everything else there. If you'd rather have a plain "Last updated on" line at the end of each article, in your own wording, you can add it to every article in Joomla with one HTML snippet in Code Snippets. A smart tag fills in the date, so the snippet is a single line of HTML.

How to add this snippet

1. Install Code Snippets if it isn't installed already.
2. Log into your Joomla backend.
3. Go to Components → Tassos Code Snippets.
4. Click New.
5. Enter a title, for example Last updated date.
6. Set Code Type to HTML.
7. Set Insertion Method to Auto-Insert Locations.
8. Set Location to After Article Content.

9. Paste this code into the editor:

   <p class="tcs-last-updated">Last updated on {tcs article.modified --filter=re:\s.*}</p>

10. Click Save & Close.

The line shows on single article pages only. Category blogs and the featured page stay as they are.

The Article locations are part of Code Snippets Pro. With the free version, type the line from the snippet at the end of the article text instead: Code Snippets replaces smart tags inside articles too, on single article pages.

To show the line only in some categories, use Conditional Logic on the snippet instead of changing the code.

How the snippet works

The snippet is one paragraph. When the page renders, Code Snippets replaces the {tcs article.modified} smart tag with the modified date of the article on the page. Change the text before the smart tag to your own wording, and keep the tag as it is.

Joomla stores the modified date as "2026-10-15 08:28:06", in UTC, and that's what the tag prints on its own. The --filter=re: option removes whatever matches the regular expression after it, here the space and the time behind it, so only "2026-10-15" is left. Remove the option to show the time as well.

An article that has never been edited shows its creation date, because Joomla sets both dates when the article is created. The line is a plain paragraph with the class tcs-last-updated, so a CSS snippet can style it.

Check that it works

1. Open any article on your site.
2. Scroll to the end of the text.

A line reads "Last updated on 2026-10-15", with the article's own date. Edit the article, save it, and reload the page: the date moves to today.

Other article data works the same way. {tcs article.created} prints the creation date, and {tcs article.user.name} the author's name.

To show how long an article takes to read, see Display Estimated Reading Time in Joomla Articles. To learn more about how HTML snippets work, read the HTML snippet docs.