Date picker lost month/year navigation in v6 (regression from v5) #1501

Statamic 6’s date picker is a step backwards from Statamic 5. In v5 you could click the calendar heading (“November 2027”) to open a month/year selector and jump straight to any year. In v6 that’s gone: the header only has previous, today and next, so reaching a date a few years out means clicking “next” once per month.

Editors relied on this, and losing it has real consequences. Our client is a concert venue that books events two to three years ahead. Creating an event in 2029 now takes around 40 clicks. The client has flagged it as a regression in their upgrade acceptance testing, and it’s one of the first things they noticed. They see it as the CMS getting worse, not better, and it makes the v6 upgrade harder to justify to them.

Typing the year into the segmented input isn’t a substitute. Editors don’t only use the calendar to pick a date. They use it to check that a date falls on the right weekday, e.g. that a concert announced for a Friday really is on a Friday. That check needs the calendar open on the right month, which brings them back to clicking through every month in between. The calendar is where they look, and where this always worked before.

We’ve added a temporary workaround (a CP script that adds month/year selects by clicking the previous/next buttons), but that’s fragile and shouldn’t be needed for something core did out of the box.

Proposal

• Restore month/year selection: either a clickable heading as in v5, or month and year dropdowns in the header.
• Respect earliest_date and latest_date when listing selectable years.
• If needed, a fieldtype setting for the year range

Screenshots

Environment

Statamic 6.38.0, Laravel 13, PHP 8.5.