In the latest post from the Ibuildings techPortal Lorna Mitchell takes a look at one of the more powerful features included in PHP versions 5.2 and greater - the DateTime class.

In the newer PHP 5.3 versions even more excellent functionality was added. This is a short post to introduce this functionality with a focus on the methods available in PHP 5.2 showing some simple examples of how we can more easily manipulate and display dates without needing to work with timestamps.

She shows how to create a simple DateTime object, how to change up the timezone information related to it and has an example of how to output the format with a call to the format function. She also mentions how they can simplify the storage of date information in a database since they can be moved around between timezones easily (instead of having to calculate the different between where it was created and where it's being used).