Slawek Lukasiewicz has a new post today about working with dates and times in PHP on a more object-oriented fashion than in the more traditionally procedural way of just calling PHP date/time functions on the string values.

Date and time manipulation in PHP is mostly connected with functions like: date, time or strtotime. They can be sufficient, but if we want to deal with dates like with objects - we can use DateTime class. DateTime class is not only straightforward wrapper for standard functions, it has a lot of additional features - for example timezones.

He shows how to use the DateTime functionality to return an object you can call several different methods on. He gives examples of the formatting call, comparing one DateTime object to another, how to update the date after the object's created, calculating the difference between two dates and iterating through a certain time period.