On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial that's been posted spotlightling a PHP library that can make working with dates and times simpler: Carbon . In this new tutorial they walk you through what the library has to offer and plenty of examples of it in use.

Carbon is a small library for date and time manipulation in PHP. It relies on and extends the core DateTime class, adding helpful methods for a significantly saner experience.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some basic usage examples, and then use it in a real project.

They start with the installation (via Composer) and a few examples of it in use, determining if a given date string is a weekend, in a leap year, etc. They also talk about localization support and working with time intervals. He then gets into the more real-world part of the example, updating the Diffbot client to optionally support Carbon for its date/time handling. He starts with some tests to define how he wants the handling to work and how to use it to parse the date returned from the DiffBot API.