Yesterday I had two people report problems with the dates being displayed in Tasks and Tasks Pro™. A little digging into this leads to these notes (how it used to work) in the MySQL documentation. Data that used to be returned as ‘000000000000’ is now coming back (in some configurations) as ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’. This is a problem if your code doesn’t expect it and mine certainly didn’t.

Not only is the format of data returned from a TIMESTAMP column variable now, but the auto-updating features can’t be counted on either. Frankly I don’t see any reason to use this field type anymore and won’t for new development. I don’t know if I’ll bother converting the existing columns or not, I might want to when I add more time features so I can keep my code trim.

I’ve added checks to work around this (check the formatting and update the date_modified field manually) that I’ll release in new betas next week.

Sincere thanks to Gabe for his help debugging this.

This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.