I've made an extension, "EventCountdown".
On Meta's "Extending wiki markup" page it says that I should now notify this list.
The extension can be found here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EventCountdown_Extension
Briefly, it's useful for displaying messages like "Only 11 days 'til X Day", which automatically vanish when X Day arrives. On our intranet, I use it to display countdowns to various trade shows or key product releases.
If anyone's a localisation expert, take a peek. It has a feature to pluralise "day" so it doesn't say "1 days to go!" but I don't know how to approach localisation. Any tips would be good, or go ahead and modify the extension yourself.
All feedback is welcome!
On a tech note: I'm a C++ programmer, new to PHP, and I'm a bit worried about whether I'm polluting the global namespace with symbols like my function "getDaysBetween". What's the deal with that in PHP?
cheers, Matt Curtis