This is such a great addition to umbraco. The only thing missing is the ability to insert "today" as the default date into a Date field. Since the Date Datatype requires a valid date in order to save, the provided $date$ variable doesn't work, but what if we could use a "code" date which your software would convert to "today" on creation of a new document?

Now, I haven't examined your source code to see if this sort of intervention is possible, but if it is, perhaps that generic date "1900-01-01" could be used?

So, if someone wanted to specify that the Standard value for a date field should be "today", they would just put in "1900-01-01".

I ikmagine that it is a safe bet that no one really wants to use 1900-01-01 as a date for their content, but if you think that could be a problem, make the actual date value configurable, like the date format is.

Just a thought.

~Heather