Outputting current date

Bloke · 2023-12-05 10:36:55

[ split off from this post and this post (my fault, I did the split badly). I have quoted the missing preceding post in this article. ]

phiw13 wrote #336011:

[ split off from this post ]

I was surprised that the PHP prefs, and particularly in articles, was turned ON by default. Luckily lower-level users/authors can’t include anything PHP in articles.

Flipping the pref(disabled by default) is perfectly fine, even expected :-).

My use of PHP in pages/forms is very limited nowadays – one stood out when checking on a live site: a snippet for the email body of contact forms (com_connect plugin, fetching the value of a select widgets for output in the email, as documented by the plugin). Or another one, the current year, for a website-wide copyright. Something you cannot fetch with TXP tags.

<p>©2004-<txp:php> echo gmdate('Y'); </txp:php> - me </p>...

phiw13 wrote #336011:

the current year, for a website-wide copyright. Something you cannot fetch with TXP tags.

I believe Oleg tweaked the <txp:posted /> tag (might be 4.9 but I think it made it into 4.8 – memory is hazy here) so you could specify an arbitrary date. Whether it allows you to do “this year” I’m not sure. If not, it would be a handy addition as I always resort to PHP for this.

etc · 2023-12-05 10:43:12

Easy: <txp:posted gmt time="now" format="%Y" />.

Bloke · 2023-12-05 12:36:35

Perfect. I seemed to remember you posting examples like this before but couldn’t find them.

phiw13 · 2023-12-05 22:35:27

Easy: <txp:posted gmt time="now" format="%Y" />.

Ooh. ~~Another PHP snipped out~~ not really. Thank you.

–^–^–

Edit I take that (partly) back. I really should test in the context I actually use it…

The quoted txp:posted tag works fine on an individual article page, but not on list pages.

Tag error: <txp:posted gmt time="now" format="%Y" /> ->  Textpattern Notice: Article tags cannot be used outside an article context.

a <txp:date /> tag?

–^–^–

I think this was the (a?) previous discussion Bloke mentions above.

Last edited by phiw13 (2023-12-06 00:17:04)

bici · 2023-12-06 00:14:00

etc wrote #336016:

Easy: <txp:posted gmt time="now" format="%Y" />.

just to confirm. this doesn’t yet work on 4.8.8 as I just tried it and no DATE was output.

Vienuolis · 2023-12-07 17:23:33

Would be interesting to understand how often and under what circumstances PHP code is in use in the content of a) articles and b) pages.

I am rather ashamed to keep PHP enabled in forms for just one small reason — I do not know how to display an URL of the requested web page in a simpler way than

$urn = urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$urh = "{$_SERVER['HTTP_SCHEME']}://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}";
$url = "{$_SERVER['HTTP_SCHEME']}://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}";
$escaped_url = htmlspecialchars( $url, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8' );
echo '<a rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" style="text-decoration:none" href="' . $escaped_url . '">' . $urh . $urn . '</a>';

I have applied it for 404 response only.

phiw13 · 2023-12-08 00:25:19

I think that <txp:page_url type="request_uri" /> will help you there. In your example, it would output /nowhere.

Documentation is here

Vienuolis · 2023-12-08 07:17:21

Oh, I missed the types – it’s a treasure, thank you very much!

jakob · 2024-03-31 13:56:04

Bloke wrote #336015:

I believe Oleg tweaked the <txp:posted /> tag (might be 4.9 but I think it made it into 4.8 – memory is hazy here) so you could specify an arbitrary date. Whether it allows you to do “this year” I’m not sure. If not, it would be a handy addition as I always resort to PHP for this.

phiw13 wrote #336030:

Ooh. ~~Another PHP snipped out~~ not really. Thank you.

–^–^–

Edit I take that (partly) back. I really should test in the context I actually use it…

The quoted txp:posted tag works fine on an individual article page, but not on list pages.

Tag error: <txp:posted gmt time="now" format="%Y" /> -> Textpattern Notice: Article tags cannot be used outside an article context....

a <txp:date /> tag?

–^–^–

I think this was the (a?) previous discussion Bloke mentions above.

Just rooted around to find this post, and tried it out – but as Philippe says, I had no luck getting output in a non-article situation. It’s not a big deal to use <txp:evaluate query="date('Y')" /> as long as one remembers to enable date for txp:evaluate in the advanced settings, but it would be neat to be able to easily output/format arbitrary dates, especially with international output.

Another thing I often farm out to txp:php blocks or shortcodes is formatting from-to date(/time) ranges for event lists. That would be handy in a function. Perhaps this is more plugin territory?

etc · 2024-03-31 16:29:39

I’ve just added <txp:date /> tag to dev, please test and suggest feature ideas. Currently it works e.g. like this:

<txp:date gmt time="now" lang="de" calendar="hebrew" format="%Y %b" />

You can also set type attribute to retrieve any txp date field:

<txp:date type="file" time="created" />

but this will only work in file context. Old date-related tags work like before.

Bloke · 2024-03-31 17:56:02

That. Is. Amazing.

Another chunk of PHP eradicated from my templates. Thank you.

etc · 2024-03-31 18:19:28

It’s yet time to bloat it with extra features ;-)

jakob · 2024-03-31 19:59:41

Wow! Excellent! Was this something you’d tried before or did you concoct this just now? Either way, in very brief testing for now it works as advertised. Big thanks!!

Other time-related functionality I can think of is:

compare against some specified time so that one can display something related to a particular time, e.g. “show from__” or “show until __”.
formatting from->to dates. I currently have a custom solution for this, but what makes it tricky is finding a simple way to define attributes for the various combinations across time unit boundaries, e.g. 3 – 6 April 2024, 31 March – 2 April 2024, 25 December 2023 – 6 January 2024, etc. In German, I typically have two variants: one verbose as described and one concise with the 03. – 06.04.24, 31.03. – 02.04.24, 25.12.23 – 06.01.24, so I have these hard-coded in my own version.

Whether or not these pass the “bloatware” test ;-) I’m happy to have this new tag in our tool belt. Thank you.

Bloke · 2024-03-31 20:32:30

Date ranges are an absolute mare. And virtually impossible to code across languages in a meaningful way.

I’ve got a delivery date range Shortcode for a client, and the Form that outputs that one line is about 175 lines of PHP.

jakob · 2024-03-31 20:45:45

Bloke wrote #336998:

Date ranges are an absolute mare. And virtually impossible to code across languages in a meaningful way.

I’ve got a delivery date range Shortcode for a client, and the Form that outputs that one line is about 175 lines of PHP.

Wow. Mine is obviously a lot simpler. This mini plugin is what I use for my own use.

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