Display product creation and modification timestamps on storefront in Magento

I’ve noticed that within the catalog_product_entity table of the MySQL database, there are two important fields: ‘created_at’ for the date a product was created and ‘updated_at’ for the date it was last modified.

I would like to know how I can display these dates on the frontend of my Magento store. Is there a straightforward method to retrieve this information so it appears on product pages for customers? I’m aiming for a solution that ensures these timestamps are visible without needing to add them as specific product attributes. Has anyone successfully implemented this or can share the steps to access these fields in the template?

Oh interesting! I’ve been wondering about this too. Do the timestamps slow down page loading at all? And are you planning to show both dates or just one? I’m curious if customers actually find this helpful or if it looks too technical.

had this exact prob last month. i overrode the product block class & added getter methods for the timestamps, then called them in my phtml template with basic date formatting. worked perfectly and didn’t break during updates. way cleaner than messing with attributes.

You can show creation and modification dates on your Magento storefront by modifying the product view template. Create a custom block or extend the product model to grab the created_at and updated_at fields straight from the database. In your template, use $product->getCreatedAt() and $product->getUpdatedAt() to pull these timestamps. Format them with Magento’s date helper so they look clean. I did this for a client by adding a note in catalog/product/view.phtml that showed when the product was available and last updated. Works great because you get real-time data without messing around with separate product attributes.