Formatting Dates

Get the Full CMS Date, Time, and Timezone

Do you need to access the exact date & time from your CMS datetime field, to use in javascript, an integration or JSON-LD?

Here's how to get it.

The Problem

When you insert a datetime field into an HTML Embed, it's emitted in an incomplete form;

• The date is always formatted as _{MMM DD, YYYY}
• > e.g. _{Apr 01, 2024}
• The time is stripped
• The timezone is missing

Unfortunately, this doesn't contain the information you need and it's not in a format that you can use with most systems.

APIs typically require an ISO-8601 datetime format, which looks more like this-

_{2024-04-01T23:03:04+13:00}

This format unambiguously indicates April 1st, 2024, at 11:03 pm and 4 seconds, in the GMT+13 timezone.

HTML Embed Hack

You can solve this, with a bit of a hack;

Notes

Webflow.js uses Moment.js under the hood for its date functions, and this includes the format strings that you see inside of the CMS field embeds.

• Moment.js format strings
• The ISO-8601 format string is _{YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ}

Adding the _Z at the end ensures that the stored timezone is actually represented, e.g. _+13:00.

NOTE: Webflow appears to store datetime fields internally in a consistent and unambiguous form. When you render it using the _Z timezone specifier above, the datetime will automatically adjust to the timezone that your site is set to in site settings, and will specify that timezone offset, e.g. _-04:00.

This is ideal for your scripts and API use, since it expresses a complete and unambiguous time - however using the _Z specifier is essential to get that timezone setting automatically. The reason is that Webflow is pre-converting the datetimes to your site's timezone setting prior to the formatting step. If you instead used e.g. _+00:00 in the format string, you would get an incorrect datetime, unless your site settings are also set to a +00:00 timezone like [GMT+0:00] Europe/London.

Formatting Dates Visually w/ Multiple Text Parts

For display purposes, you create custom displays using multiple date time parts;

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