Date language other than English

In 2006 I reported a bug in Xoops that there is a real problem in date notations in languages other then English. The bug was confirmed by Marcan and Mith, but Skalpa never had the time to review/solve the problem.

Short explenation:

When dates are called like: Wednesday 12th of May, you can't let Xoops translate it into Dutch for example (it would be displayed/renamed to "woensdag 12 mei"). We have tested it with other languages/server configurations etc, but it seemed the main problem lies in the Xoops core.

SF bugreport:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1499945&group_id=41586&atid=430840

Xoops forum thread:

http://www.xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=42500&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&type=&mode=0&start=0

edit: typo

Maybe a short followup post, and explain my motivation.

Their are two types of importent data, one the content, second the date. All websites powered by xoops in languages other then English are forced to use numeric date notations (eg 12-02-2007), while notitions with real day and month conversions would aprove the users experience (seeing wednesday instead of only 12). It's hard for me to explain it in English, let me know if my issue isn't clear enough.^^

I understand what you mean ...

Yep, I worked many hours trying to find a solution. I promise I will do everything I can to fix this after our first release. Perhaps other great developers on are team will also have solutions to propose. Bur for now, I would really like to see the items mentioned in the 0.5 version of our roadmap ready for jan 1st.

But we'll fix this sooner or later

That's great news Marcan;) Thanks in advance^^

I've always wondered why the date/time script has to be hardcoded in global.php

could we not put this into a preference setting that will allow users to change this from admin without editing files?

use the php date function etc, i'm not sure if by doing that it would make multilanguage easier in that regard.

Quote:

Yes, please!

I agree that the date/time format should be more easily configurable.

I think it should also be configurable by each user separately.

This may be getting off-topic, but a related issue is that the formatted date/time is constructed in a .php file, which has the side effect that cached blocks such as Recent Topics use the timezone of the last user who caused the block to get cached, rather than the timezone of the current user. It would be better for the .php file to only provide a timestamp to the template, which gets dynamically converted to a formatted date/time.

I'd love to see this option configurable in the admin and also as Dave suggested within the users profile so they can set how they want the date to appear for them personally.

I would also like to avoid what some modules do which allow the date to be set in admin, and that is to simply say to the user go to php.net and figure it out yourself.

Although it's relatively easy to figure out, our CMS targets people who sometimes don't wish to learn php, settings or variables, a cms system is to make it easier to publish information. So with that in mind an admin setting perhaps with a drop down box choosing how it should be displayed.
Or at minimum a simple explanation of the php date settings rather than saying "go figure".

both of those shouldn't be too difficult Tom. I'll add this to the feature request and work on it myself :)

things like this i can probably do, and leave the harder coding to the people that have the knowledge and experience :)