New media has met its match.

The following article assumes you have a solid understanding of PHP 4, PHP 5 and MySQL, and skips all basic setup instructions and explanations in effort to provide you with quick, concise information. It also assumes you have a MySQL database setup with a a field called date that is set as type: DATE.

Storing the current date along with new data into a MySQL database table is a piece of cake. Unfortunately there is little-to-no documentation about how to format a stored date using PHP at runtime.

Assuming your database is already set up and you have a table with a field named date of type DATE, your query would look something like this:

The native PHP function CURDATE() saves the current month, day and year into your database table’s ‘date’ field in the format yyyy-mm-dd. So now we’ve got our date stored, which is awesome, but chances are we’ll eventually need to retrieve and display that date next to a heading, article or other saved content at runtime, and it’s not in the most widely-used format.

No need for crazy string replacement functions, insane super-nerd loops or anything else that makes your brain hurt. Behold:

This echoes Date of entry: Month/Date/Year, which is a much more common and legible way of writing the date. You can replace the slashes with periods, dashes or switch the order of m d Y to get the desired result, and of course assemble and customize your final echoed string as needed.