Inconsistent changelog release date format

[MikeMcC399]

Current behavior

Release dates in the cli/CHANGELOG.md are inconsistently formatted concerning leading zeros for day and month. For instance:

Release	Date	Notation
15.3.0	9/23/2025	no leading zeros
15.2.0	9/9/2025	no leading zeros
15.1.0	09/02/2025	leading zeros
15.0.0	08/20/2025	leading zero
12.5.1	02/2/2023	leading zero for month only

Desired behavior

1. Decide on whether month and day in changelog release dates should use leading zeros or not.
2. Document the preferred format in the Guide Cypress App - Managing the Release Changelog
3. Reformat dates in the changelog according to the decision

Test code to reproduce

View cli/CHANGELOG.md

Cypress Version

12.4.0 - 15.3.0

Debug Logs

N/A

Other

• Most release dates in the cli/CHANGELOG.md document are written without leading zeros, which would favor aligning with this format. Example: 10/6/2025

• The default format for the Linux date command pads numeric fields with zeros, for instance date '+%m/%d/%Y' to print the current date, which would be one reason to choose leading zeros. Example: 10/06/2025

• A more radical change would be to use ISO 8601 which avoids the issue that some countries such as the United Kingdom use day/month/year with a different ordering of day and month, so the date 10/6/2025 means 10th June 2025 when written in the UK, not Oct 6th, 2025. In ISO 8601, digits are padded with leading zeros. Docker release notes use this format. Example: 2025-10-06. Same for Node.js release dates.

[MikeMcC399]

@jennifer-shehane

If you want to give an opinion on this, I can pick up the work to document the decision and to harmonize the changelog dates here and in the documentation repo.

If you don't believe it is necessary / desirable to harmonize date formats then please reject the issue and close it.

[MikeMcC399]

@jennifer-shehane / @AtofStryker

I submitted this issue a while back without getting feedback so far.

If you'd like to have the format for dates in the changelog harmonized, then please let me know, otherwise I'll drop the topic.

[AtofStryker]

@MikeMcC399 I would be OK with consistent date formats in the changelog. I'm thinking we go with the leading zeroes approach and keep that consistent.

[MikeMcC399]

@AtofStryker

I would be OK with consistent date formats in the changelog. I'm thinking we go with the leading zeroes approach and keep that consistent.

Many thanks for your feedback! I've submitted a set of 3 companion PRs to document the new rule and implement the formatting change, both here and in the published location on https://docs.cypress.io/app/references/changelog

• docs: add CHANGELOG date format rule #33070
• docs: update CHANGELOG dates with leading zeros #33071
• Update changelog dates with leading zeros cypress-documentation#6334