Magento Date Timestamp Formatting

I was working on some records in a customer module tonight and ran into the need to format dates the Magento stores in the created_at and updated_at attributes.
The problem I was having was that no matter how I used the PHP date function, I could only get my value to return a date from the year 1970.

If you too get the wrong date after using something like:

$created_at = date("Y-M-D", $product->getCreatedAt());

Then you need to first pass your created_at value through the mage core/date model’s timestamp function, and then pass it in the PHP date function, like so:

$created_at = date("Y-M-D", Mage::getModel("core/date")->timestamp($product->getCreatedAt()));

Worth noting that Y-M-D is more less a regexp for the date function, and can be altered in a number of ways to product the exact date format need (See PHP Date for more information about date formatting).

Also, the created_at and updated_at attributes from Magento carry the date string all the way down to seconds so formatting your date can also include hours minutes and seconds if you desired.

Thanks.