Dates and the Web

Tinderbox automatically keeps track of two dates: Created (the date and time when a note was first made), and Modified (the date and time when the note was most recently changed). You can create your own date attributes, too; for example, Published might be the date when a note was first added to the public version of your Web site.

Agents can use dates to good effect. A container for weblog items, for example, might automatically timestamp a note whenever it's added, whether freshly-created or moved from another place. Or an agent could collect all news items whose ReleaseDate has already arrived, but not items whose ReleaseDate is still in the future.

Many weblog writers want to display dates associated with their notes; Tinderbox offers great flexibility in date formatting. To include any date, simply add the placeholder ^Get() to your template:

^Get(modified)^

To format dates, add a second argument to ^Get:

^Get(modified,"format-string" )^

where "format-string" describes the way you want the date to appear.

Format strings let you present dates and times in exactly the way you wish. They can appear in your language or in English, in whatever style you prefer.