I am creating a PHP guestbook for the Official Jerome Flynn Website (www.jeromeflynn.com). So far, I have not encountered any problems. However, I have gotten into some trouble with dates, and being a PHP novice, I must say that I am clueless when it comes to working with dates - be it Java, VB, VBScript, or PHP. I have already checked out the PHP manual and the MySQL documentation as well - to no avail. My "PHP+MySQL for Dummies" book didn't help very much either. I would appreciate it if someone told me how to record the date and time from a computer, send it to a MySQL database, and bring it out of the database, reformatting it as "01 Jan 2000 00:00:00". I already know that I will have to use the format "d M Y H:i:s" for this, but I don't understand the deal about timestamps. Thanks in advance!

There are a few ways of doing this. One way is to have a DATETIME field in the database. This will store the data in the format:
'0000-00-00 00:00:00' (year, month day)
To set it, INSERT a NULL value into that field.
You can then output it as if text.

Another way is to use PHP to get and format the date and time:
$thedate=("d M Y H:i:s");
then store it in a VARCHAR field.
If you still want to sort on date, you could combine both methods, using the DATETIME for sorting only.

There probably is a way to get and format data from a DATETIME, but I can't remember it just now.

Hi david,

Thanks for the tips! I'm using a DATETIME field at the moment, and I'm having trouble reformatting the dates after I bring them out of the database. I think I'll set it to VARCHAR and see what happens. Thanks again!