Testing date fields: strtotime tips

Unit testing the creation of a node with a date field could fail because of wrong interpretation of the date by strtotime function

  $settings = array(
    'type' => 'my_bundle',
    'field_date' => array(LANGUAGE_NONE => array(array('value' => strtotime('15/02/2014')))),
  );
$node[] = $this->drupalCreateNode($settings);

This will fail with an uncaught database exception because the character used as separator in the date ( / ) means a US date for strtotime. The - means an european date -> 15-02-2014

Display errors - WSOD

The bootstrap override the values you could set to display error ad the reporting level. To be 100% sure everything is printed out when something fails in a blank screen (wsod), make index.php like this:

Properly render a field

Drupal offers a few (sometimes complicated...) solutions to output a field. Lets take an example with a date field.
To display the full rendered field: field_view_field()