[TYPO3-core] time/date display in FE (and BE)

[Martin Kutschker]

[should have been an annoying crosspost but I failed to spell typo3.teams.core]

Hi!

Many extensions show dates and times. Some extensions have the format 
configurable (via TS or constants), some not *.

IMHO there's no need to configure every single extensions. There is even an 
OS suppport for preferred date/time formats: locales. If we don't want to 
use locales we should at least try and use one global (TS not config!) 
value for date, short date and time. Extensions may provide ovverrides but 
should honour the default setting.

The order of options are therefore:

OS locale setting
TYPO3 setting
extension setting

For convenience TYPO3 should have an API to get a format. Something like this:

// return format string for strftime()
// $type = 'date','time','datetime_full','datetime_short'
function getDateTimeFormat($type) {
   if (isset($TSFE->config['format_'.$type])) {
     return $TSFE->config['format_'.$type];
   }
   switch ($type) {
     case 'date':  // eg 08/24/2006 or 24.08.2006
       return '%x';
     break;
     case 'time': // eg 01:43:37 PM or 13:43:37
       return '%X';
     break;
     case 'datetime_full': // Thu 24 Aug 2006 11:44:03 AM CEST
       return '%c';        // or Do 24 Aug 2006 11:43:01 CEST
     break;
     case 'datetime_short':
       return '%x %X';
     break;
   }
   return '[%c]';
}

The function does not do the strftime() because you might want to add some 
other strftime() formats to your output.

For extensions you could even have extension global defaults with local 
overrides. eg

plugin.tx_ext_pi1 {
   format_date = %m/%d/%y
   single_view.format_date = %c
}

And AFAIK there is one global date/time format setting for the BE. But this 
is IMHO bogus as it should be language dependent.

Masi

* Indexed search is such an exampe :-(