how do I format the dates in tpl theme files for D7

good question :)

i tried

format_date(strtotime($field_news_date['de'][0]['value']), 'medium', '', 'Europe/Paris');

but the timezone seems not to be applied (all dates are two hours early)

I have a field for date-of-birth (field_dob) which has Y-m-d granularity, so no timezone conversion. But when it's stored it's subtracting an hour - because I'm in the UK on British Summer Time, presumably.

So a field_dob might look like this:

value (String, 19 characters ) 1958-09-21T23:00:00
timezone (String, 13 characters ) Europe/London
timezone_db (String, 3 characters ) UTC
date_type (String, 4 characters ) date

Where the date of birth was 22nd Sept 1958. I then put the date into a DateObject:

$dobj = new DateObject($item['value'], $item['timezone']);

Which doesn't give me the right answer. So.....

Working from the basic principle that the date module knows how to get it right :-) I did some investigating and I can see what we need is the code in the helper function date_formatter_process() in the date.module

It's going to be ugly.

Ah well.

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Can someone tell me if this is right? Maybe i'm dense but this has been really frustrating...

I'm just trying to get the date out of the field in a preprocess function. (in the correct timezone)

$db_value = $node->field_event_date[$node->language][0]['value'];
$date = new DateObject($db_value,'UTC',DATE_FORMAT_ISO);
$variables['event_date'] = format_date($date->format('U'),'custom','F j, Y g:i a');

The formatter has all the values you want. You can create a custom theme to override the current themes (date_display_single and date_display_range) and you will have all the values and you can do anything you like with them.

did anyone find a solution,
is there a D7 date_convert function?

I do have a solution but it's tied up in a module which I hope to release some time soon - it allows you to fetch field data in a variety of ways and sorts out all these niggling little details. (Sorry I can't do it straight away - real life has me stupidly busy making websites and earning the pennies.)

Here is my example code to output a custom formated date field:

$field_name='field_date';
$items = field_get_items('node', $node, $field_name);
$field = field_info_field($field_name);
$instance = field_info_instance('node', $field_name, $node->type);
$item=$items[0]; //Just display the first date
$display=field_get_display($instance, 'default', $node);
$display['settings']['format_type']='short'; //Alter the display
$vars['dates'] =date_formatter_process('date_default', 'node', $node, $field, $instance, $langcode, $item, $display);
$output=theme('date_display_combination', $vars);  

you can also use the Date object from the date_formatter_process function.

Or you could use my module field_extract which allows you to specify formatters as well as just extracting values correctly.

Just sayin'.

Using an existing date format preset (short):

print render(field_view_value('node', $node, 'field_my_custom_date', $node->language, array(
  'settings' => array(
    'format_type' => 'short'
  )
)));

Thanks, krell!

(Tried to delete this so I could post a reply instead, but couldn't — pardon.)