The best way to store date/time in MySQL for use with 'date' helper?

[eluser]danmontgomery[/eluser]
You can use mysql's datetime instead of timestamp if you're unsure about the date range. Storage costs 8 bytes instead of 4, no timezone conversion happens and you lose the "on update current_timestamp" functionality. Per http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/datetime.html, the range is '1000-01-01 00:00:00' to '9999-12-31 23:59:59'. Other than that they are functionally the same.