Date formats - Wikitech-l

24 Jul 2006


      I've removed almost all of the time and date functions from the
Language*.php files of my working copy (now checked in as the
localisation-work branch), replacing them by format strings in the style of
PHP's date() function. They're much easier to understand than PHP code, so
hopefully this will encourage people to review and edit them.
There is a chance that I made a transcription error during this process, and 
there is also the chance that the original language files had an incorrect 
or non-ideal date format to start with. So I invite everyone to have a look 
at them. I formatted the date "15 January 2001, 12:34" in every defined date 
format in every language, and put all the resulting strings at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Date_formats
One deliberate difference since the previous version of MediaWiki is to make 
our ISO 8601 formats technically correct. This format had been labelled "ISO 
8601" since I introduced it to the wikitext date formatter, but somehow when 
it was copied to the language files, and a time format added, someone forgot 
to include the "T" separator between time and date. The ISO 8601 format was 
originally requested by Ray Saintonge in the interests of standardisation, 
and I would like to see MediaWiki remain true to that goal.
You can find the format strings themselves in the Messages*.php files at:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/localisation-work/phase3/...
In other news, I think the localisation-work branch is now ready for beta 
testing.
-- Tim Starling