Manual:Timestamp

The format of timestamps used in MediaWiki URLs and in some of the MediaWiki database fields is yyyymmddhhmmss. For example, the timestamp for August 9th, 2010 00:30:06 UTC is 20100809003006. The timezone for these timestamps is UTC.

MediaWiki's wfTimestamp() function provides a convenient way to convert from timestamps in common formats to the MediaWiki timestamp format and vice versa. Read Manual:wfTimestamp for more details. Never use wfTimestamp() when inserting a timestamp into the database; this will break in Postgres and possibly other non-MySQL databases. Instead use DatabaseBase::timestamp(), aka $dbw->timestamp(), which converts a timestamp in one of the formats accepted by wfTimestamp() to the format used for inserting into timestamp fields in this DBMS.

wfTimestampNow() is a convenience function that returns a MediaWiki timestamp for the present time.

MediaWiki stores timestamps as strings rather than native timestamp types because MySQL's TIMESTAMP type had major limitations when MediaWiki was first written.

Datatypes

Here are the various timestamp datatypes used in the MediaWiki core:

binary(14)

• user.user_email_authenticated
• user.user_email_registration
• user.user_email_token_expires
• user.user_newpass_time

binary(14) default ''

• filearchive.fa_deleted_timestamp
• filearchive.fa_timestamp

binary(14) NOT NULL

• msg_resource.mr_timestamp
• protected_titles.pt_timestamp
• transcache.tc_time

binary(14) NOT NULL default ''

• archive.ar_timestamp
• ipblocks.ipb_timestamp
• oldimage.oi_timestamp
• page.page_touched
• revision.rev_timestamp
• user.user_touched

binary(14) NOT NULL default '19700101000000'

• logging.log_timestamp
• querycache_info.qci_timestamp

varbinary(14)

• watchlist.wl_notificationtimestamp

varbinary(14) NULL

• page_restrictions.pr_expiry

varbinary(14) NULL default NULL

• job.job_timestamp
• job.job_token_timestamp
• page.page_links_updated
• user.user_last_timestamp
• user.user_newtalk

varbinary(14) NOT NULL

• uploadstash.us_timestamp

varbinary(14) NOT NULL default ''

• image.img_timestamp
• ipblocks.ipb_expiry
• recentchanges.rc_timestamp
• recentchanges.rc_cur_time

timestamp NOT NULL

• categorylinks.cl_timestamp