CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I experienced problems when my custom date field representations were chosen different (f.e. 'd MM yyyy') from the 'global site date field representation' (which was dd/mm/yyyy for me).
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,18285.0.html

I thought that when changing the date representation of a custom date field, that the representation of the stored date would simple appear in another form (i.e. 31 dec 2009 instead of dec 31 2009). Instead I got dates being 'represented' as '1 jan 1970' or the year of the date becoming 1 or 2 years in the future.

So I was wondering if there is any reason to let the developer choose different date representations in custom date fields, if it only works correctly when the same representation is chosen as the date representation chosen for the global civicrm site.

IMO it seems that there should be a link between the global date representation and the field date representations. When changing one, the other should change too, to avoid the experienced problems.

Unless of course there are reasons for which the programmers have allowed this 'flexibility' (and I guess there will be). 
So please consider this just as a suggestion.

Thanks for your reply Dave. In the meantime I got the suggestion that this behavior might be due to a missing php parameter, so I'm checking first with my provider (who set up the php settings) if this might be the case, and will keep you posted. If not I'll try to recreate the problem on the public demo.