Liferay Freemarker datetime format with 4-digit year

four-digit-year.ftl

<#setting time_zone=timeZone.ID>
<#setting locale=locale.toString()>
<#setting datetime_format="MM/dd/yyyy">

<ul>
   <#list entries as entry>
      <li><li>${entry.title} - ${entry.modifiedDate?datetime}</li></li>
   </#list>
</ul>

This snippet makes sense only if you have en_EN or en_US locale: this way english users will see dates in format MM/dd/yyyy, as they expect.

Here, if I change my portal language to italian and so my locale becomes it_IT, the datetime format remains MM/dd/yyyy because it is forced on that format at line 3.
But this is not the desired behaviour: if locale is it_IT, I should see a dd/MM/yyyy format instead.

Is there a way to solve this?

Thank you

OK, now I understand what you want to achieve. In that case I think you might need to use conditional construction that sets the datetime_format according to the current portal locale.

<#setting time_zone=timeZone.ID>
<#setting locale=locale.toString()>

<#assign portalLocale=locale.toString()>
<#if portalLocale="en_US">
  <#setting datetime_format="MM/dd/yyyy">
<#else>
  <#setting datetime_format="dd/MM/yyyy">
</#if>

${.now?datetime}

Ok, not very confortable if I have to manage a portal supporting 30 different languages, but I got the point.
Thank you!