date

The date tag outputs a string according to the given format parameter using the given date parameter. If no date provided, the current time is used.

<cms:date />

<cms:date k_page_date />

<cms:date k_page_date format='jS M, Y' />

Parameters

• date
• format
• gmt
• locale
• charset

date

The date to be formated.
This parameter is expected to be in ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’ format (e.g. 2010-05-30 21:35:54). All date related variables set by Couch tags, e.g. k_page_date, k_page_modification_date, k_archive_date etc., are in this format.

If date is omitted, current date is taken with regard to variable ‘K_GMT_OFFSET’ from CouchCMS configuration file (config.php).

format

The date tag supports two different types of format characters - locale-aware and non locale-aware.
With locale-aware characters, you can specify that the date is to formatted according to, for example, french locale or italian locale by setting the locale parameter.
The locale-aware characters all have a % sign prefixed to them.

If parameter format is omitted the default is assumed i.e. format='F d, Y'

The locale-aware and the non locale-aware characters cannot be intermixed.

Non Locale-aware format characters

Locale-aware format characters

gmt

By setting this parameter to ‘1’, you can get the GMT equivalent of the date provided.

locale

If you use the locale-aware format characters mentioned above, this parameter can be set to the locale desired for formatting the provided date.

<cms:date k_page_date format='%B %d, %Y' locale='french' />

<cms:date k_page_date format='%B %d, %Y' locale='italian' />

<cms:date k_page_date format='%B %d, %Y' locale='russian' charset='windows-1251'/>

This feature depends entirely on the indicated locale being available at your web server. If the locale is not available, the default 'english' locale is used.

charset

Some locales do not provide their output in UTF8 character set. This causes strange ?? characters to appear in the output.
The date tag can help converting the output to UTF8 if you can provide it with information about the charset used by the locale.

For example -

<cms:date k_page_date format='%B %d, %Y' locale='greek' charset='ISO-8859-7' />

<cms:date k_page_date format='%B %d, %Y' locale='russian' charset='ISO-8859-5' />

The following is a rough list of the charset used by different languages -

ISO

ISO-8859-1
Western Europe and Americas: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

ISO-8859-2 - Latin 2
Latin-written Slavic and Central European languages: Czech, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovene.

ISO-8859-3 - Latin 3
Esperanto, Galician, Maltese, and Turkish.

ISO-8859-4 - Latin 4
Scandinavia/Baltic (mostly covered by 8859-1 also): Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. It is an incomplete predecessor of Latin 6.

ISO-8859-5 - Cyrillic
Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian.

ISO-8859-6 - Arabic
Non-accented Arabic.

ISO-8859-7 - Modern Greek
Greek.

ISO-8859-8 - Hebrew
Non-accented Hebrew.

ISO-8859-9 - Latin 5
Same as 8859-1 except for Turkish instead of Icelandic

ISO-8859-10 - Latin 6
Latin6, for Lappish/Nordic/Eskimo languages: Adds the last Inuit (Greenlandic) and Sami (Lappish) letters that were missing in Latin 4 to cover the entire Nordic area.

Windows

Windows-1258
Vietnamese

Windows-874
Thai

Windows-1252
Latin 1 languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish

Windows-1250
Central Europe languages: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian

Windows-1257
Baltic languages: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian

Windows-1251
Cyrillic languages: Azeri, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Russian, Serbian, Tatar, Ukrainian, Uzbek

Windows-1256
Arabic, Farsi, Urdu

Windows-1253
Greek

Windows-1255
Hebrew

Windows-1254
Turkic languages: Azeri (Latin), Turkish, Uzbek (Latin)

Examples

sample formats

A few ready-to-use format examples -

<cms:date format='Y-m-d H:i:s' />      (MySQL)
<cms:date format='D, d M Y H:i:s' />   (RSS)
<cms:date format='Y-m-d\TH:i:sP' />    (Atom)
<cms:date format='l, d-M-Y H:i:s T' /> (Cookie)
<cms:date format='l jS \of F Y h:i:s A' />
<cms:date format='F j, Y, g:i a' />
<cms:date format='m.d.y' />
<cms:date format='j/n/Y' />
<cms:date format='\i\t \i\s \t\h\e jS \d\a\y.' />
<cms:date format='D M j G:i:s T Y' />

relative dates

Dates can be set as strings, relative to current day or another date e.g.

Current -365 days: <cms:date '-365 days' />
Current +1 day: <cms:date '+1 day' />
Current +1 week: <cms:date '+1 week' />
Current +1 month: <cms:date '+1 month' />
Current +1 day 4 hours 2 seconds: <cms:date '+1 day 4 hours 2 seconds' />
First day of current week: <cms:date 'Monday this week' />
Last day of previous week: <cms:date 'Sunday last week' />
Next Thursday: <cms:date 'next Thursday' />
Last Monday: <cms:date 'last Monday' />
First day of next month: <cms:date 'first day of next month' />
First day of next month: <cms:date 'first day of next month' format='l' />
Last day of march 2009: <cms:date '2009-03 last day of this month' format='l, j/n/Y' />
Christmas Day next year: <cms:date '25 december next year' format='l, j/n/Y' />
Yesterday 14:00: <cms:date 'yesterday 14:00' format='j F, Y H:i'/>
Tomorrow: <cms:date 'tomorrow' format='Y-m-d' />
Tomorrow noon: <cms:date 'tomorrow noon' format='j F, Y H:i' />
A minute before midnight: <cms:date 'midnight -1 minute' format='H:i' />

date comparison

Compare dates with tag ‘cms:if’ & make sure the left-hand-side of the equation is a variable e.g.

<cms:set post_date="<cms:date k_page_date format='Ymd' />" />
<cms:if post_date lt "<cms:date format='Ymd' />" >
   ...
</cms:if>

usage in filters

Use variables in custom_field as well (always use double quotes " with expressions) e.g.

<cms:set curr_date="<cms:date format='Y-m-d H:i:s' />" />
<cms:pages custom_field="my_date <= <cms:show curr_date />">

Variables

This tag is self-closing and does not set any variables of its own.

Related Tags

• number_format