Date configuration and settings
Drupal: 7
16m
- [Configurations & Settings] [Dates with Drupal 7] [Chapter 2] [With Karen Stevenson]01s
- In this chapter, Karen is going to discuss the basic configurations of the date module06s
- and basic configurations in general.10s
- She'll begin with the modules required for the series12s
- and move into setting date-related variables in core.15s
- The steps that Karen discusses are the backbone18s
- for all future date-related configurations and integration.21s
- Today, we're going to take a look at the basic configuration of the date module25s
- and basic configuration of dates in general.29s
- I'm looking at a new installation--Drupal 7 Installation. 33s
- Nothing is installed yet, and the only thing I've got available right now 37s
- is the package that I downloaded for the date module from Drupal.org.42s
- If I go to the Modules page, and I collapse the core information,47s
- I can see that I have a whole lot of modules, and that's because the date package51s
- is actually a whole suite of modules that can be used in various ways.55s
- I might use some of them. I might use none of them.01m 00s
- We'll be talking as we go through the videos about what all these different options are01m 04s
- and how you can use them, but for now the only thing that we need 01m 09s
- is we need the date API, and the date API is the core of all of the date functionality01m 13s
- and is required by everything else that the date module does.01m 19s
- Then we want to create some date fields, and for that, 01m 24s
- we need to enable the date module and that makes date and time fields available01m 27s
- to be added to content,01m 33s
- and the last thing that we're going to do for right now is, we're going to enable 01m 36s
- the date tools module.01m 39s
- The date tools module is a really handy tool that gives us a wizard that will 01m 41s
- get us started really quickly with dates.01m 48s
- So for now, that's all I'm going to do is enable those.01m 51s
- When I do that, I get this message up here that says that the date API requires01m 56s
- that we set up the site time zone and first day of week settings,02m 00s
- and that we also set up the date format settings.02m 03s
- And what this is saying is that on the site that I'm using right now,02m 06s
- these variables have not yet been set,02m 11s
- and they need to be because the date module cares about how these things are set.02m 16s
- So if I click through the first one of them, 02m 22s
- this is the regional settings.02m 25s
- The regional settings is where I identify my default country,02m 26s
- which I had to do as a part of the installation.02m 30s
- This is also where I set up the first day of the week,02m 33s
- and in the United States, we generally would have the first day of week be Sunday,02m 35s
- but it could be Monday or perhaps another day of the week.02m 40s
- The date module also adds this option to use the ISO-8601 week numbers.02m 46s
- This is not something that most people are using probably,02m 52s
- but if you're doing something with dates in a calendar, and you're in a country02m 56s
- that you uses ISO week numbers for calendars instead of calendar numbers,03m 03s
- which is a different kind of way of calculating what the week is,03m 07s
- then you can check this box.03m 13s
- If you do that, you have to set the first day of the week to Monday03m 17s
- because the ISO week numbers require that the first day of the week be Monday.03m 19s
- I'm in the United States. I don't need that, so I'm going to leave that unchecked.03m 24s
- I've got my time zone already set up, and I also see that I have a place03m 29s
- where I can designate whether or not users can set their own time zones.03m 32s
- All of these time zone configuration settings can play into the way that the date module works.03m 35s
- So I'm going to save that.03m 43s
- Then the second place that I need to fix is, if I go back to 03m 45s
- the administration configuration screen, and I scroll down to the very bottom,03m 48s
- I can see this regional and language section.03m 54s
- These are core settings. 03m 56s
- I already fixed the regional settings, but I need to also fix the date and time settings,03m 59s
- so I'm going to select that.04m 03s
- And this is the place where I can set up formats for the way that dates are displayed04m 06s
- on my site.04m 11s
- Now by default, I end up with the 24-hour clock because that's what Drupal does by default.04m 13s
- I'm in the United States. I'm going to change that.04m 19s
- So I'm going to change my long, medium, and short settings to match 04m 22s
- the way that I want dates to be displayed in my system.04m 26s
- So in my system, I want to use the 12-hour clock, and then I'm going to do this,04m 29s
- where I'm showing the medium format is the full name of the month, the day, the year04m 38s
- and the time using the 12-hour clock.04m 44s
- Then for my short format, I want the month, day, year as numbers using the 12-hour clock.04m 47s
- That's my particular way that I want to set this up.04m 59s
- We're going to use this for the videos that we're working on right now,05m 02s
- but you can obviously set those up to match something appropriate for your site.05m 04s
- But there's another part to this.05m 11s
- In addition to these long, medium, short types, we can also in the format options 05m 12s
- that come with it, we can also set up custom formats,05m 18s
- and there are a lot of formats that are really useful when you're using date fields05m 22s
- and using dates in general.05m 28s
- We're going to go ahead and set a few up.05m 29s
- Now nothing--no custom date formats are in here to begin with,05m 32s
- so we can add a new one.05m 36s
- We can see it just is a text area or text box where we can put in a date fomat string.05m 38s
- There's a link here to the PHP manual that describes what these things are.05m 45s
- I'm going to open this in a new tab just to make it easy to get to.05m 49s
- I'm going to go over here, and this is what date formats look like.05m 54s
- So date formats basically are a bunch of letters--a letter or a number of letters--05m 59s
- that describe how you want the date to look.06m 04s
- So for instance, a lowercase d says I want to see the day of the month in 2 digits06m 07s
- with leading 0's, so it would look like 01 to 31.06m 12s
- The j is the day of the month without leading 0's, so same thing as d--as the lowercase d,06m 15s
- except the leading 0 is left off.06m 23s
- The capital D says, I want to see the 3-letter abbreviation of the name of the day06m 25s
- and so forth.06m 32s
- You can read through this whole list, and you can see that there are letters here06m 33s
- that represent various ways that you can look at dates.06m 40s
- So what I want to do is, I want to create some additional formats that I've got available to me06m 45s
- in my system.06m 49s
- So 1 thing I might want to do is, there are places where I maybe only want 06m 51s
- to be able to see a year, so I'm going to add the capital Y as a format 06m 54s
- and a capital Y is the 4-digit year.06m 58s
- I'm going to add a format for a lowercase j, which is the day without the leading 0's,07m 02s
- and I think it would be nice to have a date format without the time,07m 10s
- and that would look like month/day/year because I'm in the United States,07m 16s
- and we use the month, day, year format, so I'm going to add that.07m 21s
- Then it might also be nice to have a time without a date,07m 27s
- and so if I do g, i, a--g means 12-hour clock:, i means minutes, and then a means a.m. or p.m.07m 31s
- I can see that as I type these options in, they are displayed over here to the right,07m 43s
- so I can kind of see what this is going to look like.07m 48s
- I add that.07m 50s
- That's pretty good, so I've got some additional options.07m 52s
- If I go back over here to the types, and I open up my options,07m 56s
- I can see that all these new custom options are now available to me as well as 08m 00s
- the options that I saw before.08m 03s
- So that's one part of the equation.08m 06s
- I've got some new formats available to me, and I could say08m 08s
- I just want to change my short format to be a date only, for instance.08m 10s
- But in fact, I probably want to just leave these original formats alone--08m 14s
- or these original types alone--and add some new ones.08m 21s
- So I can add a new type, and I can call it date.08m 23s
- I could say my date format is this new format string that I just created08m 26s
- that displays the date without the time.08m 31s
- I can add a new type called time, and I can use, for that, I'll use that format08m 35s
- that I just created that has the time without the date.08m 41s
- Then I'm going to go ahead and add year that uses that format that I just created08m 45s
- that has just the year in it.08m 52s
- And I'm going to add day, and that's going to use this format that I created 08m 55s
- that has nothing but the day.09m 02s
- So now I've got some nice additional formats available that I can use in various ways,09m 06s
- and I can use these things in views.09m 13s
- I can use them to format the way that my dates display.09m 15s
- I can use them anyplace that the system uses this long, medium, and short format options.09m 18s
- So let's go back to the modules page now.09m 25s
- We've got that set up.09m 28s
- Scroll down here, and when we enabled the date tools,09m 30s
- date tools has a configuration page, which is the page where you can actually09m 36s
- set up the date wizard.09m 40s
- It also has a permissions page, so let's take a quick look at that09m 42s
- and see what permissions we got.09m 45s
- If we scroll up a little bit, we can see that date tools comes with permission to administer09m 47s
- the date tools.09m 53s
- Now date tools, lets us do some very powerful things.09m 54s
- It lets us create new content types.09m 57s
- It lets us add fields to those content types.09m 59s
- So this is a permission that you'd want to restrict very carefully to just the highest level10m 03s
- of people.10m 10s
- Then I can go back down here and click on the configure link10m 12s
- and that takes me to the place where I can actually manage my date tools.10m 19s
- The main thing that the date tools has is the date wizard.10m 27s
- I'm just going to flip back and show you one more way that I can get there10m 31s
- rather than going through the modules page, if I go back to the configuration page,10m 33s
- and I scroll down, you can see that I've got a date API section10m 37s
- of the configuration page, and I also have a link there to get to this date tools.10m 41s
- So let's go ahead and use the date wizard to get us started real quickly.10m 48s
- What it does, basically, is it says it's going to automatically create a content type,10m 53s
- and then attach a date field to it and set it up in a good basic way,10m 58s
- so you don't have to go through all of the individual steps of creating the content type11m 05s
- and adding the field.11m 09s
- If you have the calendar module enabled, it also is going to give you an option11m 11s
- to create a calendar at the same time.11m 14s
- We don't have the calendar enabled, and we'll be showing that kind of thing later.11m 17s
- So right now, we're just going to create a date content type and a date field.11m 23s
- If I scroll down, I can see that for the content type I can choose the content type name,11m 27s
- and this is the machine-readable name and then the label, 11m 32s
- which is the human-readable name,11m 35s
- and then a description, and in this case, we're not linking this to a calendar,11m 37s
- so I'm just going to change this description a little bit.11m 42s
- Then down here a little bit farther, we have the place where we can set up the date field11m 47s
- and the date field name, and this is the machine-readable name for the date field11m 53s
- that we're going to create in the label.11m 59s
- Then I have an option of a text field or a select widget for the type of widget,12m 01s
- and I would have other options if I had other modules enabled,12m 09s
- which we'll demonstrate later.12m 12s
- There's some advanced options. 12m 14s
- I can make some additional changes to time zone handling and granularity,12m 16s
- and we're going to talk about all those options later,12m 20s
- but for right now, we're just going to create something that uses the defaults.12m 23s
- So you can see that what we ended up with is, we ended up with a content type called date.12m 29s
- It has a title. It has a date field, and it has a description.12m 34s
- Let's go ahead and just try adding some content to see what this is going to look like.12m 39s
- So I've got a new content type, and this is my test date,12m 45s
- and I can choose whether or not it's got an end date,12m 52s
- and let's do 10:45 to 11:45 on April 3rd, and my description goes here.12m 54s
- So I can put whatever into my description, and I save it.13m 08s
- There we go! 13m 12s
- In just a couple of steps, I got to the point where I had a date.13m 14s
- Now one thing looks a little bit funny, and that is my date is below the description,13m 19s
- and in fact, I would have wanted that date to be above the description,13m 24s
- so let's go back and see what happened there and fix it real quickly.13m 27s
- So if I go on my structure to the content types area,13m 31s
- I can see where my date content type is.13m 35s
- There is a link here to the manage display for the date field,13m 37s
- and you can see that it looks like the date is above the description,13m 42s
- so it, in fact, is where it belongs, but it's not showing up right,13m 46s
- and this is actually nothing to do with the date module.13m 50s
- This is just a quirk in the way that this draggable table in the field UI works.13m 53s
- All I have to do is move them and move them back just to trigger the fact 13m 59s
- that there's a change and save it.14m 04s
- Now if I go back and take a look at that content that I just created,14m 06s
- now I've got it where I want.14m 10s
- The date is on top, and the description is below.14m 12s
- Now the last thing that I want to do in this initial step to get started14m 15s
- is I want to create some content.14m 19s
- I'm going to create some views. I want to do some different things.14m 20s
- It would be nice to have a lot of content that already has dates on it.14m 23s
- So let's go try and do that.14m 27s
- If I go back to modules, I previously downloaded the Devel module--D-E-V-E-L.14m 30s
- The Devel module comes with something called Devel generate,14m 38s
- which is a really nice tool for creating dummy content,14m 41s
- just for cases like this.14m 48s
- So I'm going to enable Devel generate, and it requires Devel,14m 50s
- so I'm going to enable both of those, and I'm going to save that.14m 53s
- If I go to the configuration area now, and I scroll down.14m 59s
- I can see that I now have some options to generate content, menus, terms, users.15m 04s
- I'm going to go ahead and generate some content, and I want to generate content15m 08s
- of the type date, and I could choose to delete all content if I had some content in there.15m 12s
- In fact, I created that one little dummy note, and I'm going to go ahead and delete that15m 19s
- at the same time I create some new dummy content.15m 24s
- I can choose how far back into the time the nodes should be created--15m 28s
- or should be dated.15m 31s
- Now this does not have anything to do with the date field date.15m 32s
- This is the creation date of the node, but it's nice when you get to things like views15m 37s
- to have things scattered over a period of time.15m 42s
- I'm going to go ahead and say--I'm going to go back a year.15m 45s
- I'm just going to go ahead and generate,15m 50s
- and it says I finished--I deleted the one node that I had previously created,15m 53s
- and I created 15 new nodes, and if I go to find content,15m 57s
- and I go take a look at one of them, I can see now I have dummy content,16m 02s
- and my dummy content has dates on it.16m 06s
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