Date

Using a type of date will create a group of select boxes (day, month, year) in the admin.

If you include the format attribute on a Perch Template Tag with a type of date, this allows you to set how the date will be displayed on the website.

The value of format should be a formatting code, e.g. format="d M Y".

Accepts either PHP date formatting (which does not support locale settings) and strftime formatting (which does).

If you set the optional attribute time to true, the date field will also have selections for hour and minute.

Examples

Date formatted as Sun 04 July 10 using PHP date formatting options:

<perch:content id="event_date" type="date" label="Date of event" format="D d F y">

An ISO 8601 standard date:

<perch:content id="event_date" type="date" label="Date of event" format="c">

Locale-compatible date Sunday, 4 July 2010 using strftime options, if locale was set to fr_FR this would display as Dimanche, 4 juillet 2010

<perch:content id="event_date" type="date" label="Date of event" format="%A, %e %B %Y">

strftime issues

strftime formatting is not the same across operating systems therefore you may find that some values do not work on a Windows system. Please check the PHP documentation for more information before raising this as an issue in Perch.

If you are developing a site on Windows but moving it to a Linux webhost then you may find that locally your formatting behaves inconsistently but the problem is resolved on the live host.

Using native HTML5 controls

If you know your Perch users have a modern browser with HTML5 form field support, you may want to use the native browser controls for date input. Enable this by adding the attribute native with a value of true.

<perch:content id="date" type="date" label="Date" format="d F Y" native>

For a datetime field add time as usual:

<perch:content id="datetime" type="date" time label="Date/Time" format="d F Y H:i" native>

For datetime-local set time="local":

<perch:content id="datetime" type="date" time="local" label="Date/Time" format="d F Y H:i" native>

Changing field order

By default, the select boxes for a date field are ordered day, month, year. Some users may prefer a different order, for example an order of month, day, year is common in the USA.

This can be set with the fieldorder attribute. It takes a string of the letters d, m and y in the order you want them.

Day, month, year:

fieldorder="dmy"

Month, day, year:

fieldorder="mdy"

In full:

<perch:content id="event_date" type="date" label="Date of event" format="D d F y" fieldorder="mdy">