Formatting dates can sometimes be a bit of a pain when selecting very cryptic timestamps from a database. mySQL has some very powerful formatting options however, and users really appreciate having a nice human-readable date presented to them.

For example, if I have a column called submit_date, which is a regular mySQL date/time field, and want to present it in the form of "Friday 21st September 2007" - you would use something like:

SELECT *, DATE_FORMAT(`submit_date`, '%W %D %M %Y') as submit_date_formatted FROM `table`...

The result of the field submit_date_formatted will be a nicely formatted date string. Check the mySQL website for a full list of variables you can use to format your dates.

If you find you use date formatting a lot in your application, it's worth your while to define a variable in a global config somewhere and include this in your queries. This lets you easily change your date formatting in the future, or even allow for user-selectable date formats. e.g

DEFINE('LONG_DATE', '%W %D %M %Y');

... and your query would look something like:

SELECT *, DATE_FORMAT(`submit_date`, '. LONG_DATE .') as submit_date_formatted FROM `table`...