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And is most likely why it wasn't done then.

Would have thought PHP would have implemented a much simpler way to do this by now, to just be able to use date() as normal and just set the location somewhere else and have it all localised

I don't know how Woltlab did this, but the language switching including the date format is working fine there without problems. You can test it here if you want. You can also look at the source if you download their free framework