gmdate to format times, thus allowing it to take advantage of locale, if set,
to print dates in the appropriate language. Several userdate invocations
had to be changed, though, to use the different formatting specs.
Sections covers "weeks", "topics" and anything else that may come along.
Note, again, some databases have changed esp course_weeks -> course_sections
and several fields called "week" are now "section. Also course no longer
has an enddate, but instead has a numsections field.