Gnome 3 has a menu bar that includes the day of the week and the time. The date and time settings allow the time to be shown in 24 hour or AM/PM style.
There do not appear, however, to be any options for displaying the date. Instead of "Thu 1:59 PM", I'd like it to read (for example) "1:59 PM, Thursday, March 28, 2013".
How can I configure the format of the date in the menu bar?
You can use dconf-editor to change many of the settings (GSettings) on your GNOME desktop environment. For this case you need to install the dconf-tools package. Run dconf-editor and find the appropriate key for your time settings.
e.g. org.gnome.desktop.interface.clock-show-date
[To expand on what liberforce said]
gnome-tweak-tool, sometimes called Advanced Settings
Activities -> Show Applications -> Tweaks
This program was preinstalled on my Debian installation.
Select Top Bar in the left menu.
Then enable date.
The gnome-tweak-tool works (the dconf-editor does not) debian 7(wheezy) ... however now the box is too narrow to display the time ... sigh
Turns out this is a "real-estate" issue , I used https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/112/remove-accesibility/ to recover a small bit of space, now I can see date AND time
In GNOME 3.28.2, this setting made the date show up in the top bar:
/org/gnome/desktop/interface/clock-show-date
I use GNOME Flashback. The path to the relevant settings in dconf-editor is /com/canonical/indicator/datetime/:
