Changing Drupal Authoring Information

By Lynn Beighley and Seamus Bellamy from Drupal For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Every time you post an article, Drupal includes changeable authoring information. Authoring information is the poster's username (in this case, admin), along with the time and date the article was posted.

By default, articles include this information and basic pages do not.

You can fine-tune your control over this with the Authoring information section when you create or edit your article.

By default, your username will appear in the Authored By text box. You can change it or leave it blank if you don't want an author name to appear.

The Authored On text box allows you to change the date of the posting. The date is in the format year-month-day hour:minutes:seconds. When you save your post, Drupal takes that date and reformats it to a date in a format like 07/21/2011 – 11:46.

To change the format of this date, follow these steps:

Log in as an administrator.
Choose Configuration→Date and Time.

It’s located in the Regional and Language links near the bottom of the page. The Date and time configuration page appears.
Locate the Short Date Format drop-down list, in the bottom half of the page, and select a new format.

This is the format used as the Authored on Date.
Click Save Configuration.

You can fine-tune the appearance even further by clicking the Formats tab on the top right. This causes a form to appear, where you can precisely customize the date by clicking Add date format.

If you are determined to create a custom date format, we recommend visiting this page: www.tizag.com. Scroll down to the heading “Reference” and use the information there to build your date.