On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Nancy Wichmann <[email protected]> wrote: > Next question: Is there are Drupal or database-independent date formatting > function that produces a DATETIME value. I know I can use date() with > something appropriate, but I don’t know how efficient that is.
using PHP functions like gmdate() should always be more efficient, because these functions (or, date_create() and date_format() in drupal 7) are what format_date() uses anyways. Multiple times in fact.. it's a rather slow function if you benchmark it. If you do use format_date() to put dates in the database make sure you give it a time zone to use, otherwise you will end up with datetimes in different time zones depending on the current user's configured time zone. > Would there be any interest in my submitting a patch for “format_date($time, > ‘datetime’)?” If this patch gets committed http://drupal.org/node/325827 then date() function will also work in the current user's time zone, not the server-wide time zone, so it wouldn't be useful for inserting dates in the database or generating date-based URL path components that should not vary depending on the current user's time zone. I might be interested in a helper function that generates dates in the site-wide default time zone, otherwise developers will be doing this which is pretty verbose for getting a date: format_date($timestamp, 'custom', $format, variable_get('date_default_timezone', date_default_timezone_get()), 'en') --mark
