Context based date format setting

Feature Requests
1

At the moment date format setting is in the config.inc.php file and affects all journals in the same installation.

With multi journal installations it would be a good thing to have a context based date format setting. Any plans to do this?

2

Hi @ajnyga,

We don’t have specific plans for that, but it would fit in nicely with this issue: [OJS] reduce the config file to vital options, and move the other to the database · Issue #4687 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

Generally I would worry about our ability to keep the setup forms navigable with all of the random config.inc.php settings moved there, but in the case of date/time formats, I think it could be argued that setup forms are a better place anyway.

I would want to figure out a pattern for settings to be configured site-wide in general, but optionally customizable per journal, so that it’s still possible to make a global change for cases where journal managers haven’t customized things.

(Tagging @NateWr on that for consideration!)

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

I mean ideally you could argue that this kind of stuff even belongs to the locale file?

I mean you could have some translation keys there where you could define a date pattern to be used with that locale and that would be the fallback value?

Also to consider is that should this be a site level setting, context level setting or even an user level setting?

(and are you writing to the forums at 4 AM?)

4

I think it makes sense to offer the date formats to journal managers through the journal settings.

Looking through the config file, I don’t see any other settings which should be exposed to the journal manager, so I don’t think this would lead to a cascade of new settings.

However, from a coding perspective, it’s nice to have global access to the formats. Many of the places where the formats are used would require us to inject a Context object deeper into the stack. This is probably something that we could reliably use the Request for, though, since the expected format is most likely to match the context of the request rather than the context of the object. (For example, a site admin looking at submission dates in the administration area will expect formats in the site’s date format, not each journal’s format.)