Previously I’ve blogged about using ddwrt to format dates and datetimes. Well, today, I found myself trying to figure it out again, so here is a reminder. Remember, one of the big advantages of this (in the UK at least, where we are UTC time half the year) is that the DateFormat function accounts for daylight savings (i.e. the difference between GMT and BST)

Add this to the xsl:stylesheet tag at the top:

xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime"

Then you can use something like the following (where item_date is an XSL variable with our date in it):

<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDate(string($item_date), 2057, 15)" />

Here the FormatDate function is taking the string of the date, formating it for Great Britain’s locale (2057), and specifying an output format (15). Output formats vary by locale, and not all seem to be valid. I found that when I tried a format of ‘2’, for example, that I got an XSL error.

This is a particularly useful with the Content Query Web Part and the RSS Feed Web Part