#DATE is the date the item was published. (It can be manually modified once the article, news item, etc. has been published. The publishing date of a section is that of its most recent constituent element.)
If a date field has been entered incompletely, you will need to use an "*" after the #DATE tag to enable a sensible display in the public zone. For example using [(#DATE*|affdate)]:
- your date was entered in the form of"un-july-2009", the displayed date will then be "July 2009"
- your date was entered in the form of "un-unknown-2009", the displayed date will then be "2009"