Feature Proposal: Show relative dates in WebChanges

Motivation

I would like to show how long ago a topic was edited, instead of (only) its abolute time. For instance:

AlwaysServerTimeZone  50 minutes ago - r1.35
Always see local server time, everywhere, never anything else Some people have this specific requirement, e.g. on company intranets that are not international. Some ...
21 Jul 2004 - 06:21 - r1.35

Description

This would mean that each topic edit date is matched against the current time NOW.

It would be handy if this was an output argument in a SEARCH, for instance relativeDate = on.

Then there are the date words: minute, hour and day, each singular (minute == 1 and so on) and plural (the other cases).

-- ArthurClemens - 19 Apr 2005

Impact and Available Solutions

Documentation

Examples

Implementation

Discussion:

I think this is a great idea, from a usability perspective.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 19 Apr 2005

i implemented this functionality for O'Wiki, and could bring it into TWiki. however, it used CPAN:Date::Calc, which is not a pure perl module... (or, more accurately, depends on other CPAN modules, which aren't pure perl)

-- WillNorris - 19 Apr 2005

Hey, this is great! A side benefit of it is that it would make partially irrelevant the lack of ShowLocalTimeOfUser.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 19 Apr 2005

If it's not pure perl, and even if it adds another dependency on a CPAN module, it is't worth putting into the core. Surely it can't be that hard to convert a time difference in seconds to one in days? ($thisTime - $lastTime) / (60*60*24).' days ago'

-- CrawfordCurrie - 20 Apr 2005