I’ve been trying out Gibbon over the past several months for a US-based independent school and learning center. While the timetable refresh in v29 is a big improvement over the previous version, I noticed it no longer seems possible to use AM/PM formatting for time entry and display, which is still the convention in the US. Am I missing a setting somewhere, or would this be relatively straightforward to restore in the code?
in my experience with file uploading, when i use AM/PM it mess up the timings
Gibbon has traditionally used 24 hour time formats system-wide, both to remove ambiguity and because it is often a UK standard, and Gibbon was created in a Hong Kong international school. Did the timetable previously display in AM/PM? I don’t recall that we had ever added this as an option. However, we have been moving a lot of the code to using PHPs intl extension, which has more internationalisation and localisation support, and handles automatically changing things like date and time formats based on the locale. This is just on the display side though, everything in the database still needs to be in an ISO standard to prevent ambiguity (which includes imports to the database).
It may be that, in refactoring the whole timetable, this inadvertent AM/PM support was unintentionally removed. I can add it to our list to check and see about adding it back to v30 if that is the case.
Thanks for the clarification. In the v28 release it was possible to enter a time value like 2:30 PM when creating timetable columns, and the system would translate the time into 14:30, which removed a small amount of cognitive load when transcribing a collection of existing class schedules with times formatted that way into Gibbon. I’m wondering now if I’m misremembering that the time would be displayed to end-users in the format that it was entered; I only played around with timetabling in v28 for a few weeks before v29 was released.
In any case, if improvements to the underlying code make it more feasible to localize how the time is displayed, that would be a welcome feature.