Not so random - 1234099573 and suchlike in the createdon and other MODx built-in date fields are Unix timestamps, the number of seconds since the "Unix era" of 1st January 1970 (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time for details,
http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm for a handy converter. 1234567890 is Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:31:30 GMT). There’s a long thread somewhere in the forums debating the pros and cons of storing dates in this format, dwelling mainly on the ease of sorting by a simple incrementing pure number, as opposed to more human-readable formats such as YYYY-MM-DD.
A number of PHP date and time functions are based on Unix timestamps, such as strftime(
format string,
timestamp), and strtotime(
date string), which can translate between a wide variety of standard date descriptions and timestamps.
Ditto expects to receive date parameters such as &orderBy and &dateSource as timestamps, and will translate the latter for display into the format given in &dateFormat. (see
http://uk.php.net/strftime for format specifiers). So if you have docs with createdon as timestamps and you’re using Ditto, you can use parameters such as &dateFormat=`%d %b %y` to set the format to display createdon (the default for &dateSource). In your template, [+date+] is the placeholder for the resulting date string.
You don’t say how the original blog was built or how you’re converting the entries, but I hope this of some help.
KP
