how to insert a date into the database?

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Stick with ISO 8601 for your date formats - apart from being implicitly sensible, it aligns (more closely) with MySQL's native format.

You may be better off generating your datestamps from within your database directly, using the NOW() function (in MySQL - there's probably comparable functions for other RDBMS's).

Mind, if you're asking this question, then you probably don't want to track timezones for different users, etc, so it's probably less important for you to have accurate date information.