European date input in Django Admin

Question

Django has a DATE_FORMAT and a DATE_TIME_FORMAT options that allow us to choose which format to use when viewing dates, but doesn\'t apparently let me change the input forma

Answer 1

There is an official way to do this now since the closing of Django ticket 6483 & release of Django 1.2.

If you have USE_L10N set to False, what you should do is specify the DATE_INPUT_FORMATS and DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS in your settings.py. Here are the settings I use for this, based on converting the defaults:

#dd/mm/yyyy and dd/mm/yy date & datetime input field settings
DATE_INPUT_FORMATS = ('%d-%m-%Y', '%d/%m/%Y', '%d/%m/%y', '%d %b %Y',
                      '%d %b, %Y', '%d %b %Y', '%d %b, %Y', '%d %B, %Y',
                      '%d %B %Y')
DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS = ('%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S', '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M', '%d/%m/%Y',
                          '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M', '%d/%m/%y',
                          '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', '%Y-%m-%d')

If you have USE_L10N set to True, then you will need to use the FORMAT_MODULE_PATH instead.

For example, my LANGUAGE_CODE is set to en-au, my site is called golf, and my FORMAT_MODULE_PATH is set to golf.formats, so my directory structure looks like this:

golf/
    settings.py
    ...
    formats/
        __init__.py
        en/
            __init__.py
            formats.py

and the DATE_INPUT_FORMATS and DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS settings are in formats.py instead of settings.py.