I need more flexible solutions to entering dates in Drupal

The Founders and Survivors website has to cater for users with a wide range of technical skills, though the primary audience is genealogists (who I think are largely self-taught, in terms of both historical research and computer skills). The data we collect has to conform to the expectations of this audience, but I also have to be able to generate data dumps (currently in raw XML format) that meet the needs of our researchers (who also come from a broad range of technical and disciplinary backgrounds).

I am currently being driven up the wall by challenges in date input. I should write up some proper issue reports for the Date project but for now I’m just trying to explain the issues to myself.

For our mostly Australian and British users, entering a date as day, month and year is natural and intuitive. However, any of the following could be natural and intuitive:

• 11 April 2010
• 11 April, 2010
• 11 Apr 2010
• 11 Apr, 2010
• 11/04/2010
• …

It doesn’t appear to be possible, at the moment, to allow different formats – Date expects the admin to enforce one format for each field. This does not assist me in my goal of making the site easy for non-technical, non-documentation-reading users.

The help text uses the current date as an example. For a month that is spelled out rather than numeric, ‘May’ is ambiguous – is it a three-letter abbreviation or a full month?

In historical and genealogical research, we must be able to accommodate approximate dates: the month or day might be unknown, or a user might not even have an exact year, only a decade. There is a patch to Date to allow flexible granularity (leaving out the day or month), but so far this only appears to work with y-m-d format. The geeks on the project understand y-m-d, but this may not be easy for our ordinary users.

One alternative to specifying a text input format would be to use the popup widget, but this is not really helpful because: (1) no one will want to click the left arrow >150 times to get back to the 19th century, where the majority of dates belong; (2) the date is filled in in m/d/y format which is really not helpful for our audience or project.

And I don’t know PHP (or have the time to learn it) well enough to find and fix these issues myself.