collective.prettydate 1.0rc1

Formats dates, numbers, etc. in a pretty, human readable format.

Table of Contents

• Overview

• Requirements

• Introduction

• Usage

  • Timezones

  • Output examples

• Installation

• Contributors

• Changelog

• 1.0rc1 (2012-02-21)

Overview

This simple package formats dates in a pretty, human readable format.

Requirements

• Plone >= 4.1 (http://plone.org/products/plone)

• five.grok >= 1.2 (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/five.grok)

Introduction

collective.prettydate is a package that helps developers to solve some usability issues associated with the utilization of absolute date formating on sites used among different timezones.

When a date is printed as “01/02/2012” it could represent February 1 or January 2, depending on the format used. Also, if the site is located on a different timezone, it could take you to situations when today’s date is printed as yesterday, or tomorrow’s date.

collective.prettydate represents dates on a relative format so it would be printed as “last month” or “2 months ago”, which is easier to read and understand for most people.

collective.prettydate is specially well suited for sites that produce a lot of content, like breaking news.

Usage

This product provides a utility which will convert a DateTime object into a human readable text.

from zope.component import getUtility
from collective.prettydate.interfaces import IPrettyDate
date_utility = getUtility(IPrettyDate)

At this point, you can use the ‘date’ method to convert the DateTime object

from DateTime import DateTime
today = DateTime()
str_date = date_utility.date(today)

in previous example, ‘str_date’ will be “now”

‘date’ method also allows 2 additional parameters: ‘short’ and ‘asdays’ which will modify the output to be in short format (‘h’ instead of ‘hours’, ‘d’ instead of ‘days’, etc) and whole days (it will use ‘today’ instead of any amount of seconds, minutes or hours for current day). They both default to “False”.

Timezones

If your server timezone is configured correctly, and the DateTime object contains valid timezone info, then the text output will reflect the correct time. You do not need to convert date and time between different timezones.

Output examples

• ‘4 hours ago’

• ‘4h ago’ (short format)

• ‘in 28 minutes’

• ‘in 6 months’

• ‘today’

• ‘last week’

• ‘yesterday’

• ‘last year’

Installation

To enable this product in a buildout-based installation:

1. Edit your buildout.cfg and add collective.prettydate to the list of eggs to install

   [buildout]
   ...
   eggs =
       collective.prettydate

2. You may need to extend a five.grok known good set (KGS) to make sure that you get the right versions of the packages that make up five.grok

   [buildout]
   ...
   extends =
       http://good-py.appspot.com/release/five.grok/1.2.0-1?plone=4.1

After updating the configuration you need to run ‘’bin/buildout’’, which will take care of updating your system.

Contributors

• Franco Pellegrini ([e-mail])

• Héctor Velarde ([e-mail])

This product is based on py-pretty.

Development sponsored by Open Multimedia.

Changelog

1.0rc1 (2012-02-21)

• Initial release.