If you use a language that's a bit more complex than English (or most western languages, that is), you'll probably have some problems displaying dates that actually don't look like computer-generated.

Django-localdates deals with this problem, and tries to tackle the general problem of internationalizing dates.

The main issue is, if you want your application to be truly international, you have to find a translator that will translate your templates, messages, emails and everything else that a user might see. However, translating dates isn't that straightforward.

The easiest example is US vs British date format. US citizens write the month first, while the British write the month after the date. So, if you have a template that uses now "d F Y", it will look good for a British person, but not for an US person. A Russian would be appaled, because Март isn't the same as марта!

django-localdates tries to overcome all this by defining translatable date formats. Every language has a "formal" way to display dates, a short way, a numeric way and so on. So if we could just specify "This date should be formatted to be short" or "This day is the full deal", and have each translator specify what full or short means, we could solve this problem.

Here is the usage:

{{ datenow|ldate:"{FULL_DATE}" }} 

{{ datenow|ldate:"{NUM_DATE}" }}

and so on and so forth. Give it a try!. Instructions here.