S9Y Bulletproof

In the entry on theme options I mentioned the date format and referenced to the strftime section of the PHP manual. While coders and other geeks will already be very familiar with this, new users and those with no PHP experience probably will not be. So let's see what all those funny little characters actually mean.

%A, %B %e. %Y, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Well, these are variable which basically tell Serendipity how to display a date using the PHP function strftime. Every combination of % and a letter stands for a part of the possible date formats. These are the variables actually used in Bulletproof:

• %a or %A Abbreviated (%a) or full (%A) weekday name.
• %b or %B Name of the month. Again, abbreviated or full.
• %d Day of the month as a number with leading zero, i.e. ranging from 01 to 31.
• %e Same as %d above, but with a space instead of the leading zero, i.e. ranging from 1 to 31.
• %m The month as a decimal number with leading zero, i.e. ranging from 01 to 12.
• %y or %Y The year as a decimal number, either with a century indicated (%Y) or without (%y)

These can be combined with dots or hyphens to format the date display in a Serendipity blog. For example, the default date format in Bulletproof is the one mentioned above: %A, %B %e. %Y. This means the date will by default be displayed like this in a blog configured to use the English language:

Full weekday name followed by a comma, then full name of the month and decimal day of the month without a leading zero followed by a dot and the year with century indicated.

For example, for the time of writing this entry, that would result to

Tuesday, August 21.

Got it? However, if this sounds too complicated, just stick with the default or play with the theme option until you get a satisfying result