title: PHP/MySQL - Best way to work with dates in DD MMM YYYY format?
body: <p>I need to display dates in the <strong>DD MMM YYYY</strong> format on the website I'm working on. My first thought was to store the dates in a DATE type in MySQL, then convert to the proper format using PHP. However, this is just returning <strong>01 Jan 1970</strong> - not the actual date of <strong>04 May 1891</strong>. </p>
  
  <p>I found a few other places where people have asked similar questions and the answer was always something like <code>SELECT date_format(dt, '%d/%m/%Y')</code> which was giving me <strong>04/05/1891</strong>. I want the month to be 3 characters (May, Jun, Jul, Aug, etc).</p>
  
  <p>I thought about storing the dates as a VARCHAR but that seems like it would be bad practice. It looks like I will have to store the date as a string and will not be able to use the PHP date() function because it cannot handle dates prior to 1970.</p>
  
  <p>I may want to do things like calculate ages which sounds painful when dealing with strings... I am wondering if anyone has a more elegant solution?</p>