To display the date of the page use this code:

<?php echo $this->date(); ?>

If you want to change the format of the date, you can pass it as the first parameter of the method like this:

<?php echo $this->date('%A, %e %B %Y'); ?>

The default date returned is the page’s creation date. If you want to display the last updated time of this page do it like this:

<?php echo $this->date('%a, %e %b %Y', 'updated'); ?>

Other values that can be used instead of updated are:

• created — (default) which returns the date the page was initially stored in the database, no matter what “Status” it had; and
• published — which returns the date the page was first saved with the “Status” set to “Published”

For more information about the date format, check this site: http://php.net/strftime

Set the locale to your language with the setlocale PHP function:

<?php setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_CA.utf8'); ?>

For more information about this function check this site: http://php.net/setlocale

If you would like to keep your admin (backend) in English, and want your frontend to show some special characters (e.g. in Croatian - š, đ, ž, ć, č), the easiest way to do this is to put code:

<?php setlocale(LC_ALL, 'hr_HR.utf8'); ?>

on first line in your default Layout.

In the note above, users were warned that in Windows and some other environments, use of the %e parameter (day-of-the-month number with no leading zeros) can break the output. The solution is to use the reliable %d parameter instead, which gives day numbers less than 10 with a leading 0.

If it is important to have the date in the form “6 August 2009” rather than “06 August 2009”, you can use this work-around:

<?php echo $this->date('%#d %b %Y'); ?>

If that code does not produce the desired result, this more verbose method should work:

<?php $day = ltrim($this->date('%d'), '0'); echo $this->date("$day %b %Y"); ?>

Both versions remove the leading zero, where present.