date format

Hi wz-web.

The Events Calendar is nothing if not customizable and you can certainly tweak things like date formats, however here on the free support forum we are primarily concerned with helping people use existing features and figuring out bugs rather than helping with customizations.

Please do take a look at the following resources:

• Themer’s Guide
• Tutorials
• Technical Docs

Beyond that, if you need further help figuring out date formats etc please consider obtaining a license and posting on our PRO forum (or even peruse it for existing answers first of all).

A bug (I think): if you choose a month (eg may)in the datepicker (in the month grid view) and you get a result page “There were no results found.” and you click now on the list view you’ll have an destroyed layout. Same if you chosse the agenda view now.

Do you have any events in May? I don’t actually see what you mean by a destroyed layout in list view, perhaps you could share a screenshot?

Last but not least please do try deactivating all other plugins and switch also to a default, unmodified theme and see if it is still a problem.

Thanks!

Hi Barry & wz-web,

the thing with the date format is a bug, not a feature request.

I have set my WordPress to the date format ‘l, d. F. Y’ (e.g. “Montag, 05. Januar 2014”) as is custom in German. However, The Events Calendar shows dates such as “M?rz 17” (correct would be “17. M?rz” – “M?rz 17” is not correct in German). Some translation seems to be taking place (“M?rz” instead of “March”), but it doesn’t take the date format setting into account.

Thanks,
bkatrin

Hi bkatrin, I don’t believe that is a bug – I think you are described expected functionality. WordPress date formats are not automatically used in every aspect of The Events Calendar’s outputs and that is by design. However, it is certainly customizable as I explained initially.

So how come the dates were displayed correctly in German format until a couple of weeks ago, and then suddenly changed to the American format? You must have had some intention behind changing this? And how do I set The Events Calendar to correctly display German formatted dates and times again?

Cf. an example event on my page (here): You can see the correct format in the text below (“17. Februar”) and the wrong format in the 2nd line of the title (“Februar 17” – note how the month’s name *is* translated to German, but the format isn’t).

Or am I supposed to interpret your above answer to “The free version of The Events Calendar is intentionally broken to make international people buy the pro version”?

bkatrin: if you viewed that same event last year then it’s likely the format would have been different because, by default, a different format is deployed for events taking place in the current year as opposed to the next year (the rationale is that the year may be superfluous).

Perhaps that explains the difference between what you saw previously and now?

Or am I supposed to interpret your above answer to “The free version of The Events Calendar is intentionally broken to make international people buy the pro version”?

No, not at all – I have no idea how you came to that conclusion.

Both our PRO and core plugins operate in the same fashion with regards to date formatting and it is deliberate. To clarify:

• The behaviour you have described is deliberate and was done with the best of intentions (because if an event starts and ends this year, many users would see no reason to also display the year – thus two different date formats may be used in different circumstances)
• If you don’t like it, then remember it can be customized to whatever you like and I’ve already linked to a number of resources you can refer to when making changes
• There are probably examples of changing this here on the www.ads-software.com forum and certainly on the PRO forum, which is open to the public – you just can’t post there – and you are more than welcome to head across and research issues there
• We do not however have unlimited resources and the amount of support we can offer for customizations here on the free support forum is consequently limited: that doesn’t mean you must buy the PRO version and it certainly doesn’t mean we have deliberately broken the free version – that is a completely misleading statement

In summary, we absolutely understand that the defaults may not be desirable for all users but, again, you are free to customize anything you like. if you strongly feel it should operate in a different manner “out of the box” then please do post a feature request to that effect.

Feel free to browse this forum, our PRO forum and the resources I linked to initially – I hope that helps.

Hi Barry,

thanks for your elaborate description! I think I finally see that we’re talking about 2 entirely different issues ??

You say:

The behaviour you have described is deliberate […] many users would see no reason to also display the year

Where I’m not worried about whether the year is displayed or not. I’m concerned with the format of the day-of-month number and the order of day-of-month-number and month-name:

correct format […] (“17. Februar”) and the wrong format […] “Februar 17”

.

I’m sorry to be so persistent about this, but IMO, any display of dates should not just display the translated words for names of months, but also display the correct format for the given language. You would find it very odd to read “15. February” instead of “February 15” in a Calendar, wouldn’t you.

Hi bkatrin,

Thanks for explaining the problem again. I understand the issue you are talking about.

Right now, The Events Calendar only respects the WordPress Date Format settings in some places, but not all. That’s why you see both the 17 Februar and Februar 17 formats on your site.

We are actively working on making our plugin more respectful of the WP Date Settings. I don’t have a specific release date for a fix, but we are working on it. Do note however that some places, like in the Add Event page and in the Event Bar Datepicker, we are following the WP-standard international format of yyyy-mm-dd. Those instances will not be changed, as they are already in the universal format that WordPress uses.

Thank you for your patience while we work to make our plugin more international-friendly.

Best,
Leah

Thank you, Leah ??

It seems that with the newest update & the possibility to edit the date format settings, the issue has mainly gone. Thank you very much for your work!

However, there still seems to be a glitch:
Assume a multi-day event.
On the event overview and on the event’s own page, the date in English reads “October 6 – 17” (setting for “date without year” is F j).
When I change the setting “date without year” to the German j. F, the line reads “6. Oktober – 17”, which is wrong. The correct format would be “6. – 17. Oktober” (j. - j. F, not j. F - j).

Hi bkatrin,

I’m glad you like the settings! And thank you for the description of the issue you’re running into. I was able to recreate it. We didn’t know about that German style of dates, our apologies! We are looking into making that properly formatable using our settings. We will update here as we go.

If you need the German style right now and are willing to work with the code, you could potentially filter 'tribe_events_event_schedule_details' and add the period at the end. Hopefully we’ll have a built-in solution for you soon.

Best,
Leah

thanks for your quick reply, Leah.

Please note, it’s not just the period that’s missing, the position of the day-date is wrong too (see the format examples in my above post – both day-dates go before the month).

I see 2 solutions:

• A setting for “how do you want to display time ranges?” instead of “time range separator” in the date format settings. However, this could lead to problems, since in a range, there are always at least two day dates, as in two js in “j. - j. F“. How would you know which of the two days to write in which place?
• Always display the full date (“date with year” or “date without year” from the date format settings) to either side of the “time range separator” (“-“):
  date_without_year1 time_range_separator date_without_year2
  as in:
  October 17 - October 19 instead of October 17 - 19 for a “date without year” format of F j.
  In German, I can set my “date without year” format to j. F – and the range would then automatically become 17. Oktober - 19. Oktober, which would be a correct way of writing a time range.
  This would also work with “date with year” instead of “date without year”.

Thanks for the extra info bkatrin. I’ve added that to our internal ticket. We’ll do our best to keep you posted as we work on this.

Best,
Leah

Hi there,

I just wanted to drop in and update you on the status of this issue. We are working on a fix, but we were not able to include it in our upcoming release (3.7). Correcting this problem is still important to us and we hope to have a fix done for a future maintenance release. We will do our best to keep you updated here on our progress. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we work on this.

Best,
Leah

Hi there,

I just wanted to let you know that we were able to work on this issue for our upcoming 3.8 release. Keep an eye out on your site for an update announcement! If you update and are still seeing this problem, please post a new thread so we can check it out. Thank you for your patience while we got this fix in place.

Best,
Leah
and the team at Modern Tribe

Awesome, thank you! Looking at it after the update, the issue indeed seems to be resolved – thank you & the team for your work!