I have been using a simple content management system for the last several years and a new feature I am hoping to add to my website is problematic.

Simply put, I am hoping to style the date with a CSS sprites display.

The trouble is the CMS does not really allow the styling of dates because the date in a template is displayed using a single {date} tag which is only configurable by changing the PHP date string.

Rather than change CMS systems and try to convert 1400 posts, I am hoping I can add some HTML into the config file and consequently the date string.

Assuming this was no problem as is, the code would look something like this.

<div class="postdate">
<div class="month F">F</div>
<div class="day d">d</div>
<div class="year Y">Y</div>
</div>

I have found that you can escape each character of literal text but that doesn't seem to work for code. I am not particularly familiar with PHP so if anyone knows how this could be done I would be very appreciative.

I probably misunderstood what you're looking for but is this what you mean:

PHP Code:

<div class="postdate">
<div class="month F"><?php echo date(F); ?></div>
<div class="day d"><?php echo date(d); ?></div>
<div class="year Y"><?php echo date(Y); ?></div>
</div>

The code will have to be on a line of the CMS config file, which currently reads:

$datefor = 'F d, Y';

Just putting my html in there interprets every character as part of the date string.

Pretty sure passing html through the date function's acceptable parameters is impossible. I would just change all instances of date($datefor) to the code I posted above. But why would you have to change 1400 posts, don't you have a single template that all posts use? Does this CMS use a database?

I use fusion news, which uses flat files. I will try to fool with the function though, thanks.