Secrets of the ATS date format

I find the date format MM/DD/YYYY really annoying. I'm constantly looking at a date like 6/7/2008 and thinking "now, is that June 7th, or July 6th?" Perhaps I'm a little slow.

I thought I'd share a way to make the dates that ATS displays a little friendlier. The secret is to realize how powerful the "Date Format" setting in MemCenter is.

Just paste one of the "Date Formats" from the following table into your account settings, and you will get the result shown, everywhere that ATS displays dates:

Date Format Result
n-j-y 1-5-09
j M Y 5 Jan 2009
F jS, Y January 5th, 2009
d/m/y 05/01/09
D M jS Y Mon Jan 5th 2009

You can also make a custom date display, if you like, using the secret letters listed below. You can separate them with spaces, dashes, slashes, commas, or whatever you like:

Day
d Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros (01 to 31)
D Short text of the day of the week, three letters (Mon through Sun)
j Day of the month without leading zeros (1 to 31)
l Full text of the day of the week (Sunday through Saturday)
S English ordinal suffix for the day of the month (st, nd, rd or th)

Month
m Number of the month, with leading zeros (01 through 12)
M Short text of the month, three letters (Jan through Dec)
F Full text of the month (January through December)
n Number of the month, without leading zeros (1 through 12)

Year
Y Full number of the year, 4 digits (eg: 1999 or 2003)
y Short number of the year, 2 digits (eg: 99 or 03)


There's even more secret letters, documented here, but most of them aren't that useful.

Enjoy!

Just remember to set the timezone before hitting "submit", after you've made changes in your member center. After setting the timezone and hitting "submit", ignore that the timezone may now appear as wrong (it doesn't get set until you hit "submit" again). You can check if you have set the correct timezone by checking the most recent post. The post should have been posted near "your current time".

reply to post by Ian McLean


Thanks Ian, that is actually extremely helpful.

I assume the 6/7/2008 that was driving you nuts was mine.







[edit on 5 Jan 2009 by schrodingers dog]

reply to post by schrodingers dog

Ha! I didn't even notice that - it was just a convenient example. You may safely assume you've driven me nuts already, however. I don't feel need to pitch in for gas money, either.

Why does your avatar have a stick under his arm?

To topic: as a request to the board coders, which I really don't expect to be fulfilled, it would be nice to have a 'time format' option to not display the time at all, so that some of the more funky date+time display options on the page I linked to earlier can be used, without redundancy.

Originally posted by Ian McLean
reply to post by schrodingers dog

 

Why does your avatar have a stick under his arm?

I have no idea. It's the ATS original logo I got from the waybackmachine.
It's from 1999 when all ATS was just a splash page with that logo, "Inside the Black World" motto, and a "coming soon" announcement.