Date Plugins
Using It.
One obvious thing to use the date plugins for, is to output information based on todays date.
If we want to output the current month in English for example, we'd use the following code:
<@REQUIRES PLUGIN="english">
<@GET NAME="DATEMONTH:ENGLISH.MONTHNAME()">
Here we're manipulating the Hitop standard variable DATEMONTH which gives you a numeric version of the current month.
We need a number between 1 and 7 to represent which day of the week it is. Unlike the month, hitop doesn't offer a direct variable to access this value, but we can manipulate the DATE variable using the little known DAYOFWEEK() function.
DAYOFWEEK() will take a date of the format YYYY-MM-DD and will work out what day of the week it is - 1 for Monday, 7 for Sunday. We can then convert that using DAYNAME(). Thus for today, we can use:
<@REQUIRES PLUGIN="english">
<@GET NAME="DATE:DAYOFWEEK():ENGLISH.DAYNAME()">
Of course we don't need to use todays date. Supposing we had a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD as a variable called THEDATE. We could use that to extract month and day names. To extract the day name, we'd simply replace DATE with THEDATE in the example above.
For the month, we can extract the month value using a combination of BEFORE() and AFTER() to extract the value between the two -'s, thus:
<@REQUIRES PLUGIN="italiano">
<@GET
NAME="THEDATE:AFTER('-'):BEFORE('-'):ITALIANO.MONTHSHORTNAME()">
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