Drupal date format

I don’t really get the date formats in Drupal 7.

How come every date seems to use the medium format? What’s the point of the other formats, if that’s the case? And how can I use a different format for different display instances, e.g. comments and articles? I can theme-override the dates, but I’d be happier (and it would be better for the clients) if I could get that customisation just with the UI settings.

I’ve never changed the date format (short, med, long) in regular content except to change the way it’s set up mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyy, etc… I have found it very useful to mess about with the date formats in my views though and that’s where I think they are probably must useful.

How do you get anything other than medium to be used, though?

Check out this thread ofver at Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/node/1075692

As I mentioned above, I can—and do—theme-override dates with no great difficulty (and simpler than the code at your URL). I just wondered (1) why the three date formats exist when Drupal seems only to use one of them for everything; and (2) why there is apparently no option anywhere to pick a date format for each content type. Which is a totally dumb omission.

I expect the reason they have 3 formats is so that you can take advantage of them with customizing. ie: modules or theming. As I mentioned earlier, I sue this often with views when I add a date field to a content type and then create views for that content.