WordPress Theme Customizr and Missing Required Field “updated”

Since I recently started blogging, I checked my blog with the “Google Structured Data Testing Tool“. I use the WordPress theme Customizr (version 3.1.5) and everything was fine except for this message: Warning: Missing required field updated.

It seems that in the English version of the testing tool categorizes this issue as a warning while in the German version shows it as an Error. %-)

Solution

After some research and a quickly answered post on wordpress.org I checked the sourcecode of Customizr and located the problem.

The code responsible for the warning is located in file wp-content/themes/customizr/parts/class-content-post_metas.php in line 69.

The original code looks like this:

sprintf( '<a href="%1$s" title="%2$s" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="%3$s">%4$s</time></a>' ,

and this is how it’s supposed to be:

sprintf( '<a href="%1$s" title="%2$s" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date updated" datetime="%3$s">%4$s</time></a>' ,

The displayed date just needs to be assigned the classes “entry-date” and “updated”.After this was done and published, the tool reported no more warnings or errors and validated quite nicely.

Of course I notified Nicolas Guillaume about this issue and hopefully he will permanently fix it in one of the next versions of Customizr. Unfortunately the bugfix did not make it into version 3.1.6.