As anyone who has used MySql and PHP in the past to deal with time and date will probably know MySql timestamp fields are not compatible in anyway with PHP’s date() function. Because of this you need to do conversions in order to use the information from the MySql database. The following function will convert a value from a database into a unix timestamp format for easier manipulation within your PHP code. I have found it quite useful to have around so am putting it up here for others to take advantage of.

/*
* Convert MySql timestamp to unix timestamp
*/
function ts2unix($ts)
{
$year = substr($ts,0,4);
$month = substr($ts,4,2);
$day = substr($ts,6,2);
$hour = substr($ts,8,2);
$minute = substr($ts,10,2);
$second = substr($ts,12,2);
$uts = mktime($hour,$minute,$second,$month,$day,$year);
return ($uts);
}