Customized dates (and I mean _customized_)

Before they got started on the coding they’d need a phd in astrophysics ??

Nah. You’d just need a framework to say, “Month 1 hath 31 days and is named Abruk. Month 13 hath 29 days and is named Berboj.” Okay, so it’s probably a bit more complicated than that–I’m just beginning to think about it–probably would involved hijacking the normal PHP date functions, perhaps?

This is vague, I know, but … if you can write a php function that calculates the martian date given your local terrian date and time as an input, I think this would be quite easy to do.
More complicated, if internally as well, all the timestamps have to be martian, so that, eg, you could export your MySQL tables and transport them to Mars, re-import them there and wouldn’t need a date conversion script.

Serendipity, that sounds like a good start. I could probably write a function like that with a little bit of research.
Right now, I’m completely unfamiliar with the things under WP’s hood. I’ll need to start poking around and learning. Is something like this possible within the plugin framework, or would I have to customize some of WP’s code?

I’m really an absolute newbie at coding and have yet to write a fully functional function in php. But if I believe it’s doable then it’s probably dead easy ?? .
What you could do: Install WP in a play-around folder on your site, look at index.php to see how a typical template looks, read the wiki, esp. the part about the plugin api. Heck, export your MT blog, if it’s only to have something to play around with. Others have been hooked before they could say “move”, though.

I’ll do exactly that–was planning to anyway, just wanted to do a sanity check and make sure I wasn’t setting myself up for long, arduous, head-banging-wall sessions. Well, probably doing that anyway, but now I have a good idea that I’ll be able to stop at some point. Thanks.