Views: how to display different buttons before/after associated date?
There are three ways to do this kind of conditional logic:


Use the views_php module
Make a views field template
Write a views widget (or formatter, or something - what is the correct terminology?)


I ended up taking a bit of a shortcut and going ahead with views_php for now.  I'm never going to be dealing with more than a few hundred rows, so I'm not to shaken up over the poor performance of views_php.

This module is pretty easy to use.  Add a "Global: PHP" field.  I found dpm( $data ) and other variations to be very useful.