Item5003: JSCalendarContrib: Ship with ISO date format by default

< style="">TWiki is used internationally. This contrib, e.g. also the TWiki release, should use ISO date format "2007-11-21" instead of "21 Nov 2007" by default.><>
>< style="">>

Ship TWiki with this default:

<verbatim>
$TWiki::cfg{JSCalendarContrib}{format} = '%Y-%m-%d';
</verbatim>

The ISO format is easy to read. It also is easier for TWiki apps to manipulate dates (sort, etc.)

This is a small change. Can we do this for the 4.2 release?

-- TWiki:Main/PeterThoeny - 22 Nov 2007

(Above text is a bit messed up. I was fighting the WYSIWYG with LITERAL and VERBATIM.)

-- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny - 22 Nov 2007

That would become "yet another fireplace in the upgrade hell"

The list of things an upgrader needs to fix when going from 4.1.2 to 4.2.0 is getting longer and longer.

When we agreed to introduce the configurable DefaultDateFormat we defined the default as

$TWiki::cfg{DefaultDateFormat} = '$day $month $year';

to avoid more upgrade trouble

So please also keep this wise decision on JSCalendarContrib.

I am one of those upgraders to whom this would become yet another thing to fix when I upgrade.

The format is configurable so a new installer can easily change the format.

It is extremely important that upgrading is not a task that takes hours and hours. It makes cost of ownership too high.

The first time installation time from nothing to a working TWiki should be short. Otherwise newbies give up on TWiki.

Requirering some hours of work to tailor a first time installation is not such a big deal. You will need to spend 100s of hours setting up the initial content anyway and on training etc etc.

But once you have a working TWiki installation upgrading should not take more than minutes. This is extremely important. Just think about how much energy is took to convince you to update twiki.org when we updated TWiki in the past.

We need to get better at making upgrading easy and fast and all these little non-compatible changes adds up to a big problem.

-- TWiki:Main.KennethLavrsen - 22 Nov 2007

I am not suggesting to change the {DefaultDateFormat}, just the default format of the date picker. That is, all other places such as signatures, and dates in searches remain the same.

Why: TWiki apps work better with ISO date, you save some little space, it is internationalized, and it does not break existing installs.

-- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny - 22 Nov 2007

I understand what you want to change.

But when we use JSCalendar with its defaults in a twiki application then it gets broken if the default gets broken.

-- TWiki:Main.KennethLavrsen - 25 Nov 2007

I am getting frequent feedback to use date formats that are not ambiguous. Latest example, via e-mail:

While exploring the exciting topic of TWiki plugins, I found a misleading statement in the ActionTrackerPlugin docs. The section covering date formats implies that the mm/dd/yyyy format is only confusing for Europeans, while, in fact, it confuses many other people as well: Australians, South Americans, Africans, Mexicans... most of the world, really, even Canadians to some extent. (Many other parts of the world use the yyyy/mm/dd format, but it's much more obvious when that format is being used.)

While I'm surprised the plugin even supports this format, given that only a very small handful of countries use it (four, I believe: the United States, the Philippines, and two countries I couldn't find on a map), I don't mind it being supported. I just object to it being labelled a 'European' format. Americans in general may be ignorant enough not to realise they're the only country of substance that uses this topsy-turvy format (or, indeed, the metric system), but Europeans should know better. I encourage you to correct the documentation.

One other request to move to crisp ISO dates.

-- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny - 15 Dec 2007

This is a default extension. Changes to defaults would need a proposal.

-- Main.GeorgeClark - 25 Sep 2016 - 19:21

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