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The date component was deprecated for the date variable.

This article has been saved for historical purpose.

Why ?

  • The function strftime was deprecated and will be no more available from php version 8
  • The date format is not the standard.
  • The pipeline format function can be enhanced to format also number.

About

With the date component, you could format any date:

Example

Today's date

  • The markup
<date/>
  • The output is a date formatted to the default format.

Monday, 19 January 2026

To have it refresh every day, we expire the cache date daily 

<cache expiration="@daily"/>

Today's date - short format

  • Today's date with a short month description and the day number US style
<date format="%h %d"/>
  • The output:

Jan 19

Today's date in French

  • The markup with the locale attribute with just the region (ie country) as value.
<date locale="fr"/>
  • The output is a date formatted with French word.

Monday, 19 January 2026

Date specified manually

<date format="%A">2021-09-27</date>
  • The output gives the day name of the date (ie %A)

Monday

Date of a page

You can even print a date metadata of a page. 

<date>$date_published</date>
  • The output will be:

Thursday, 11 December 2025

Syntax

  • For the today's date
<date format="formatValue" lang="language"/>
  • When specifying a date value
<date format="formatValue" lang="language">dateValue</date>

where: