This is how you get a real date/time-stamp (such as article published date) in Freemarker in Liferay. With support for multilingual sites. When working with multilingual/non-English sites, date/time-stamp can be a bit of a headache as the date strings are strings with english words in them, such as Thu, 08 May 2014 11:48:00 +0000, rather than a …

real-time-date-stamp.ftl

<#-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- -> 
 -
 - GETTING REAL TIME/DATE-STAMP 
 -
 - When we ask Liferay for the create date of an article (or really we
 - ask Liferay for the 'display-date' which is settable by the user) we get
 - a string looking like this: 'Thu, 08 May 2014 11:48:00 +0000'. This
 - string will always be in english and when we want to create a datetime
 - object from it, we need to parse it with english locale.
 -
 - Therefor, when working with a non-english site we need to:
 -   1) Save the original locale (e.g. 'sv_SE') to a variable
 -   2) Set locale to 'en_US'
 -   3) Parse the date string and create a date object from it
 -   4) Set locale back to original locale, from variable.
 -   5) Create a date string from the date object.
 -
 - Common pitfall:
 - Swedish example: Most dates have similar names in Swedish and English.
 - e.g.: the English dates '08 Jan 2014', '08 Feb 2014', '08 Mar 2014',
 -       '08 Apr 2014' are all the same as their Swedish counterpart,
 -       and are therefor parseable without doing any magic.
 -
 -       However '08 May 2014' is not the same in Swedish ('08 maj 2014'),
 -       neither is 'oct'/'okt'.
 -
 -       When developing, make sure you're working with content with
 -       display-date may or october.
 -
<- ------------------------------------------------------------------ -->


<#-- Get Display Date (not created-date which is equal to when a user last
     modified the content) 
-->
<#assign date = .vars['reserved-article-display-date'].data>

<#-- Load timezone from language files, as we have multiple timezones.
     If we just had one timezone, set it like:
     <#setting time_zone = "Europe/Stockholm">
-->
<#setting time_zone = languageUtil.get(locale, "template-timezone")>

<#-- Saving original locale to be able to reset it to that later -->
<#assign originalLocale = locale>

<#-- Set locale to en_US to be able to parse the date string and make it a date object -->
<#setting locale = 'en_US'>
<#assign date = date?datetime("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z")>

<#-- Set locale to the real (original) locale  -->
<#setting locale = originalLocale>

<#-- As we want to display the date in different formats depending on the 
     language we get the date/time-format from the language files. Else
     we could set it like this:
     <#assign dateTimeFormat = "d MMMM yyyy">
-->
<#assign dateTimeFormat = languageUtil.get(locale, "template-datetime-format")>

<#-- Create a date string from the date object -->
<#assign date = date?string(dateTimeFormat)>

<#-- END GETTING REAL TIME/DATE-STAMP -->
<#-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- --> 

Try this ... The trick I found working was to use ?long

<#assign date_display = .vars['reserved-article-display-date'].data>
<#assign date = .vars['reserved-article-modified-date'].data>
<#assign date = date?datetime("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z")>
<#assign date = date?long>

<#assign now = .now?long>

<p>1: ${date}</p>
<p>2: ${now}</p>
    

<#if date lt now>
    Past
<#elseif date gt now>
    Future
<#else>
    Present
</#if>

If as I do you need to check a modified date against a certain date. The following may help. My issue was that a Web Content Template referenced a new Structure field. Which works for this point forward but web content published in the past doesn't contain that field so chokes on if statements checking for stuff that doesn't exist. No matter how much I try using getData()?? I can't get freemarker to stop throwing errors.

// The date I made the fateful change and broke everyone's templates ...
<#assign changed = 1597352716000>

// When was this current now broken content last published ...
<#assign date = .vars['reserved-article-modified-date'].data>
<#assign date = date?datetime("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z")>
<#assign date = date?long>

// What is the epoch now
<#assign now = .now?long>

<p>1: ${date}</p>
<p>2: ${changed}</p>
<p>3: ${now}</p>
    
// Ok so was this content published before or after my fateful decision to add a field to the structure?
<#if date lt changed>
    Past
<#elseif date gt changed>
    Future
<#else>
    Present
</#if>