Dates

Write a date

Write every date in front matter or in statac.yaml year first.

You seldom need to type one out:

Time zones

In statac.yaml:

timezone: Europe/London

Statac reads a date with no offset in the site’s timezone. The time zone also decides what date today is, both for a stamp and for a scheduled post. statac new offers the computer’s own time zone.

Without a timezone, Statac reads dates with no offset as UTC, never in the computer’s time zone.

How dates look

{{ page.date }} on its own shows the date in the long look of the page’s language, the way the Unicode CLDR writes it: March 4, 2026 in en or en-US, 4 March 2026 in en-GB, 4. März 2026 in de, 2026年3月4日 in ja.

In statac.yaml:

date_format: Wed 31 Dec 2025

To show every date another way, set date_format by example. Write one particular moment, Wednesday 31 December 2025 at 15:04, the way you want every date to look:

Statac copies anything else in the example, such as at or /, into every date unchanged. It doesn’t copy a word that is a slip away from one of the language’s months or weekdays: for date_format: Tusday 31 December 2025, it offers Wednesday 31 December 2025 instead.

• If the month is in figures, the day and the month keep a leading zero, as in 04/03/2026. Set date_zeros: false in statac.yaml to get 4/3/2026 instead.
• The site’s date_format needs the day, the month and the year, with the year in four figures. The month can be in figures, short or in full.
• If a date has no time, Statac leaves out the time and the words that lead into it: Wednesday 4th March 2026.
• Write the month and the weekday in the site’s language: 31 décembre 2025 on a site in French.
• In Chinese, Japanese and Korean, write a space between a word and the letters beside it, as in 2025年12月31日 星期三. After a mark that the language’s own dates use, such as 日, no space is needed: 2025年12月31日水曜日.

<p>{{ page.date | date("December 2025") }}</p>

The date filter takes an example in the same way and uses it for one date. In the filter, you can leave out any part of the date, and the year can be short.

<time datetime="{{ page.date | moment }}">{{ page.date | date("short") }}</time>

The filter can also take the name of one of four looks. Each look writes the date the way the Unicode CLDR writes it in the page’s language, and date_format doesn’t change it.

stamp adds the time. For a date with no time, it shows the same as short.

Where next?

• Front matter: stamps, which write a date into a page for you
• Languages: the language a site writes its dates in, and a date_format for each language on a site in several
• Settings: timezone, date_zeros and every other line of statac.yaml