What's the best way to manage dates across PHP, MySQL, etc?

Question

My server is in Dallas. I\'m in New York City.. and both PHP and MySQL have configuration variables for setting the timezone.

How do I get them all to work together

Answer 1

I prefer using dates and times in the native form with respect to the environment, that is, Unix timestamps in PHP and DATE/TIME/DATETIME/TIMESTAMP fields in MySQL. I translate both values into another using FROM_UNIXTIME() and UNIX_TIMESTAMP(). I prefer this instead of Unix timestamps, because native dates/times are much easier to read.