Changing 'now' to test dates

That's outside the scope of Drupal. I believe you'd have to change the time on your system clock for the server running your site. Might not be possible, unless you've got a virtual host or something.

That's what I'm saying -- you can't really do that. DateAPI is doing all sorts of date manipulation, sometimes directly via the database and/or PHP, both of which are going to be relying on the system clock for "now"...

One thing you could try is changing the date_now() function in date_api.module. I won't promise that'll cover all cases, but it'll cover most cases. ;) So, instead of this:

function date_now($timezone = NULL) {
  return date_make_date('now', $timezone);
}

you'd want something like this:

function date_now($timezone = NULL) {
  $now = date_make_date('now', $timezone); 
  date_modify($now, '+4 days');  // or whatever you need.
  return $now;
}

or, just something like:

function date_now($timezone = NULL) {
  return date_make_date('2008-11-23 14:00', $timezone); 
}

Again, I'm not positive that *every* time CCK date and DateAPI touch the current time they use a date object from date_now(). I believe there are cases where they generate SQL for NOW(), and that's going to not work unless your DB thinks the time is different, too...

Good luck,
-Derek

It would be nice to find a way to do this, it's something that would be handy. I don't know off the top of my head if this will work or if there's another way to make this work, but I'll turn it into a feature request and if anyone finds a way to do it you can post it.