Tag Archives: date formats

Dates, Times, Formatting

amr events, amr ical events list, Ical RFC5545 / 2445,

There are a number of date and time options for you to choose when displaying your events.    The main ones you should be using are created by the plugin and will be formatted by the date and time settings you have specified in the plugin settings (and applying any localisation that may be available in your wordpress setup).  You can specify these by listtype, so say a widget could have a very compact date format and a full list may be more detailed.

screnshot Date Time Formats
Date Time Format settings by listtype

Event date fields formatted by your date settings:

  • EventDate: Mon, June 23, 2014
  • EndDate: Mon, June 30, 2014 (only if event greater than one day)

Event time fields formatted by your time settings:

  • StartTime: 9:00 am
  • EndTime: 10:00 am

Note there may be situations where there is no end time or no end date (eg: if there is no duration or the end date is the same as the start date.   If a field has not been populated, it will not be displayed and neither will any ‘before’ or ‘after’ text.

Field from the ics specification that may be useful.

Formatted using human language function

  • DURATION:1 week , 1 hour

Other date fields in the ‘edit events’ admin screen

screenshot of show screen options in edit events
show screen options in edit events
  • Last 20140630

The ‘last’ date shown in the edit events admin screen shows the last recurrence date of an event.  It is used to select events within a date range (ie exclude events whose recurrences are in the past, without having to rebuild the recurrence logic).  It is also used to sort events in the admin screen by this last recurrence.   It is therefore formatted yyyymmdd for the sorting.   It is not intended to be displayed elsewhere.

Technical fields

These are direct from the ics specification formatted by the DateTime settings  in the plugin settings.   Note the DTEND has a special definition in the ics specification for all day events (it will have the next day as the end date) and may be confusing to normal users.   Some ics generators get the DTEND logic wrong, so this plugin tries to work with duration just in case.

  • DTEND: Mon, June 30, 2014 10:00 am
  • DTSTART: Mon, June 23, 2014 9:00 am

Other fields

As these are very technical, precise fields, they are by default not formatted but left as found.

  • DTSTAMP: 20140616T021842Z
    • the date and time that the instance of the iCalendar object was created.
  • LAST-MODIFIED:20140616T025756Z
    • the date and time last modified – works with the sequence number to determine the latest modification to an event instance.