Adding two helpers to make it easier to compare dates

[elephantengine]

FUNCTIONS

• phpDateToTimestamp(dateString)
• getTime()

DESCRIPTION (WHAT)
The Stencil framework returns date strings using a PHP format of "M jS Y" in the
page context. This function converts the string to milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970in order to make it easier to perform date comparisons and operations.

USE CASE (WHY)
Some examples of how this would be used include the following story: As a merchant,
I want to display a carousel on my category pages that displays cards for products
that were added to the catalog within the last month. In order to do that, I need
to be able to convert the "date added" field that appears in the product cards under
the category.products object. Likewise, the same behavior would apply to brand pages
with products.

USAGE

{{#if (phpDateToTimestamp 'category.products[0].date_added.') >
((getTime) - theme_settings.new_product_lag)) }}
/* product is newer than the given time interval */
{{/if}}

and similarly with brands: 'brands.products[0].date_added.')

@mcampa

[davidchin]

Thanks for your contribution. However, I'm not 100% sure how this would work. As far as I know, the formatted dates M jS Y don't contain timezone information (you can't assume it is always GMT). So you don't have enough information to transform them into timestamps. Hence, you can't compare with the current time reliably.

Instead of doing the conversion in the template layer, maybe we should provide unformatted timestamps in Stencil resources? @mcampa what are your thoughts?

[elephantengine]

In the developer documentation for the BigCommerce API, it mentions that all dates are returned in GMT - wouldn't that also be the case in terms of Stencil?

[mcampa]

I agree with @davidchin, we should provide the timestamp. The getTime helper can stay though