Phil Sturgeon has a new post sharing some of his thoughts on why DateTime rocks, the advanced functionality that PHP has to work with dates, times, timezones, etc.
DateTime is nothing new, but it's definitely under-used by many. It was made available in PHP 5.2.0 but got some of its best features until PHP 5.3.0. PHP 5.3.0 is pretty old now, but I learned about DateFormat::createFromFormat() after reading a new addition to PHP The Right Way: Date and Time.
He shares to "offender" examples where using this function allowed him to simplify and reduce the amount of code needed to handle the formatting of a date into a MySQL format and calculating the difference between two time values.