Accept last_reviewed_on field as a string input

What should change

Accept the use of last_reviewed_on field as a string input in any string variation; 2021/02/23, March 2027 23, January 13 2020, rather than a Date data type only. Whilst updating dependencies in the repositories listed in the next section I have found exceptions regarding the last_reviewed_on field as shown here. It appears that middleman expects the Date to be 2021/02/23 as highlighted on this page but the embedded ruby in this repository expects it to be 2021-02-23 as a Date object. As this field causes an exception it makes the title field fail causing the real error to be hidden by middleman asking for H1 tags when <%= current_page.data.title %> is used in the html file.

It currently fails here and the fix is to accept the string that is converted to a Date object:

def format_string_date(string_date)
   Date.parse(string_date)
end

User need

At MoJ we are using the tech-docs-gem in this repository to publish our template documents based on this template repository. We have many html pages that are utilising the tech-docs-gem to generate the html sites.

I have modified the tech-docs-gem ruby code and tested it works with both a string and a Date object.

Start at lib/govuk_tech_docs.rb around line 82, where last_reviewed_on currently fails when supplied as a string. Review how the field is handled for Date objects, then verify the documented date variations and existing Date input no longer raise an exception or hide title rendering errors.