Telligent’s Community Server has a REST API that allows developers to tap into almost every aspect of the database. While creating an importer for WordPress I was attempting to backfill posts with the correct publish date. Telligent provides the publish date through a field called PublishedDate, however in its default format the date is not very useful. The default date from the API looks similar to:

/Date(1273255122713-0400)/

(Yes, including the slashes!)

WTF is that???

After spending a couple hours wrangling the data I finally got it to a place where it was close to the correct post time, however it was always off by a couple hours. This caused issues when rewriting inter-post links as the day of the post was sometimes incorrect, thus causing the year/month/day permalink to be invalid.

Then I found a hidden API parameter that solved all my issues…

Add UseIsoDateFormat=true to the the URL parameters and the following ISO date format will be returned:

yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss

From there it is easy peazy to convert it into any format you may need.

Happy hacking!