On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 13:10:07 +0000, Jason Davies ucgajpd@ucl.ac.uk wrote:
does anyone have a good suggestion for how to get started with using dates, as the wikipedia does? does this involve extra installation of any kind? thanks.
I think you need to be more specific as to what you mean here. There are all sorts of things to do with dates that Wikipedia does, from putting them into different formats by user preference (a software feature) to having things, such as the Front Page, change day by day (a clever use of templates and magic variables like {{CURRENTDAY}}) to having an article on each date with various things related to that.
I suspect the last one is what you may be referring to, simply because your subject line says "...and calendar". Each date page on Wikipedia has a calendar displayed on it, made it seems out of an extremely complex system of nested templates - [[Template:JanuaryCalendar]], [[Template:JanuaryCalendar2005]], [[Template:JanuaryCalendar2005Source]], [[Template:31DayCalendarStartingOnSaturday]], etc, etc. No special software feature here, certainly no extra installation, just one hell of a lot of setting up templates to do whatever people have made those calendars capable of doing. I have literally no idea why they are so complicated, and couldn't immediately find anywhere explaining how they work; but presumably *someone* knows - maybe User:ABCD, who seems to have created some of them, could tell you...