Hey everyone,

I'm working on putting a little more flexibility in the types of dates you can put in your email templates Currently, you only have one (undocumented) choice:

<!-- tmpl_var date --> 

which isn't very useful

I've added a whole slew of new ones, included support for, "strftime", which should allow you to print whatever you'd like You can see my progress at:

https://github
com/justingit/dada-mail/tree/features-date_tags

I don't have any tests written up, yet

Below is the current addition to the email syntax docs:

Date-related tags Dada Mail includes a few tags to dynamically put the current data in your email message They'll take on the form:

        <!-- tmpl_var date
x -->

Where, "x" is a specific variable, which we'll explain below


For example, if the current date is: Monday, October 15th, 2011 at 2:55
PM, the following tags would return:

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
month -->

    Will print out the month
 For "October", this would print out,

            10

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
padded_month -->

    Will return the month, padded with a, "0" if the value is less than
    "0"
 For October, it would look the same as, "date
month":

            10

    But, for something like January, it'll look like this:

            01

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
named_month -->

    Will print out the name of the month
 For October, this would print
    out,

            October

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
abbr_named_month -->

    Will print out the name of the month, in an abbreviated form
 For
    October, this would print out,

            Oct

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
day -->

    Will print the day of the month
 For, "October 17th", this would
    print out:

            17

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
nth_day -->

    Will print the day of the month, with the correct ordinal suffix

    For, "October 17th", this would print out:

            17th

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
padded_day -->

    Will print the day of the month, padded for values less than, "10"

    For the 17th, this would print out,

            17

    But for October 1st, this would print out:

            01

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
day_of_the_week -->

    Will print out the day of the week
 For, "Monday, October 15th",
    this would print out,

            Monday

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
abbr_day_of_the_week -->

    Will print out the day of the week, in an abbreviated form
 For,
    "Monday", this would print out,

            Mon

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
year -->

    Will print out the current year
 For example:

            2011

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
abbr_year -->

    Will print out the abbreviated year (last two digits)
 For example
    2011, will be printed out as:

            11

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
time -->

    Will print out the, "Unix Time" For example:

            1318884939

*   <!-- tmpl_var date
localtime -->

    Will print out the current date and time in a format like this:

            Mon Oct 17 14:55:39 2011

    Will print out the time (hour:minute:second) in 24 hour time
 So, if
    it's 4:33 PM, this will be printed out as:

            16:33:25

You can then use these different tags to create different date formats

Little endian forms * 18 October 2011

            <!-- tmpl_var date
day --> <!-- tmpl_var date
named_month --> <!-- tmpl_var date
year -->

*   10/18/2011

            <!-- tmpl_var date
day -->/<!-- tmpl_var date
month -->/<!-- tmpl_var date
year -->

Big endian forms * 2011-10-17 (ISO 8601 international standard)

            <!-- tmpl_var date
year -->-<!-- tmpl_var date
padded_month -->-<!-- tmpl_var date
padded_day -->

*   2011-Oct-17, Monday

            <!-- tmpl_var date
year -->-<!-- tmpl_var date
abbr_named_month -->-<!-- tmpl_var date
day -->, <!-- tmpl_var date
day_of_the_week -->

Middle endian forms * Monday, October 17, 2011

            <!-- tmpl_var date
day_of_the_week -->, <!-- tmpl_var date
named_month --> <!-- tmpl_var date
day -->, <!-- tmpl_var date
year -->

*   11/09/03

            <!-- tmpl_var date
padded_month -->/<!-- tmpl_var date
padded_day -->/<!-- tmpl_var date
abbr_year -->

Flexible Date and Time formats If the included simple date tags are not enough, Dada Mail has support for "strftime" formatting using the CPAN Module, "Time::Piece"

The formatting is documented at:

<http://www
unix
com/man-page/FreeBSD/3/strftime/>

If you're familiar with PHP's time formatting:

<http://php
net/manual/en/function
strftime
php>

it's the same thing


To use this in Dada Mail's templating syntax, use the "<!-- tmpl_time_piece --> tag, like this: "

        <!-- tmpl_time_piece %a, %d %b %Y -->

This will print out,

        Mon, 17 Oct 2011