Translating, editing & formatting blog date stamps in Squarespace 7.1
Squarespace 7.1 date stamps are a mess. I had to write a code snippet to make them perfect for a recent client project. Here I’ll be gathering techniques, premium plugins, code snippets and tutorials.
The problems with Squarespace date stamps
I love Squarespace. The best tool for making websites ever. But to be perfectly honest. When it comes to date stamps, and their formatting, it sucks.
The date stamps in single blog post, the blog post list (a grid of blog posts usually) and a summary block showing the blog posts – they all have a different date format!
As if this isn’t bad enough, the single blog post doesn’t show the year of the blog post. So your visitors won’t know if an article saying “Mar 11” was written 2022 or maybe 2017.
Squarespace whatta hell?
Single blog post date format in Squarespace 7.1
The date format for a single blog post is abbreviated english month name and the day, but no year. Why is the blog post missing the year? This is horrible. Luckily, we can fix that with a bit of javascript.
Blog post grid date formats in Squarespace 7.1
The blog post grid view doesn’t use month names, has a super confusing 2 number length for the year and the date is split using a slash /. Because US and Europe have a different date format, this is super confusing.
Summary block blog post date formats in Squarespace 7.1
And then there’s the summary block. This format is actually really nice. There’s no room for misunderstanding, regardless of whether you use to the MM-DD-YYYY as in United States, or the DD-MM-YYYY like we have in europe.
Translating the blog date stamps
Squarespace has done some improvements when it comes to translating and localising the blog date formats. However, for most countries they still are not good enough.
Solution
I’m working on it! I already have a base for a code snippet. This video shows how it’s going to work. Here’s an example for editing the blog post grid view. Needs jQuery.
Full version coming soon. Until then, feel free to get in touch if you want to hire me to custom code this for you.
Need help?
Hit me up via email at @hire and let me know what kind of date format help you’d need. I’ll be making a plugin soon so any feedback and ideas are welcome.