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 -->
<#-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- -->