Inconsistent Dates

earlz · Post by **earlz** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:24 pm

I was bored so I bothered using my edit privileges to change the release status of my old JouleOS..
when specifying the release date, I had some problems..the first paragraph uses the normal American type date system (year/day/month) but for the actual projects listing, it is different..it is year/??/?? there is no day that is past 12, so I can't tell what format to use..

Really, I think you should use a more understandable format, like May 5, 2007 rather than 2007/5/5 or 5/5/2007..

Kevin McGuire · Post by **Kevin McGuire** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:18 pm

I used year/month/day.

I have no idea if it was the best way, but I know that I did it to represent the priority of year/month/day in that sequence. As I figured it was more important to know the year and month than the day.

pcmattman · Post by **pcmattman** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 8:10 pm

Day/Month/Year is the most logical to me, it's left-to-right for a start... All you Americans do everything backwards!

earlz · Post by **earlz** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 8:32 pm

lol..That's the format I use! and I'm American...so I guess some weird country uses it..(Australia?)

JAAman · Post by **JAAman** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:51 pm

pcmattman wrote:Day/Month/Year is the most logical to me, it's left-to-right for a start... All you Americans do everything backwards!

no thats not really logical -- thats backwards day/month/year is right to left not left to right (so i guess it would be natural for some language groups)
that would be like writing 4 thousand 2 hundred and eighty-seven as: 7824

year (not day) is the most-significant, so year/month/day sorts correctly, while day/month/year does not -- that said, the default in US is neither -- its month/day/year

pcmattman · Post by **pcmattman** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:53 pm

It's the 6th of June 2007. Left to right.

Brynet-Inc · Post by **Brynet-Inc** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:54 pm

The format is clearly causing confusion, Why not just "spell it out"..

As it's clear the format isn't the same in every location.. So instead of adapting to a countries standard, Find a better way.

Kevin McGuire · Post by **Kevin McGuire** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 3:12 am

jhawthorn is pretty good with templates. He might have a more automated solution that fits in with the capabilities with templates. Give him a day or two to read the messages.

Unless anyone else wants to give it a try. There is a rollback feature for the wiki pages.

jhawthorn · Post by **jhawthorn** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:26 pm

Sorry, I read everything yesterday but was too busy to reply. IMO the best way to do this with MediaWiki's #time parser function. Unfortunately, the MediaWiki version we have does not support parser functions IIRC. However, we can still use the following arguments with numerical values
|LastReleaseMonth
|LastReleaseDay
|LastReleaseYear
and use a series of if statements to print the month. I worry that this will be a performance hit for rendering the page. Template:If is already somewhat of a kludge. With 12 of them per entry, and caching of the page only in effect for anonymous viewers, it seems like a poor solution. Or maybe I have spent too much time today programming for my 486 to be realistic about this.

I'll do this to the template tomorrow, it will probably be alright.

AndrewAPrice · Post by **AndrewAPrice** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 8:47 pm

hckr83 wrote:lol..That's the format I use! and I'm American...so I guess some weird country uses it..(Australia?)

It's D/M/Y here in AU.. Y/M/D is good for sorting large directories when you organise by name.