What are the best practices for choosing and storing date formats in PHP to ensure compatibility with databases and avoid future date-related issues?

When working with dates in PHP, it's important to choose a standard date format that is compatible with databases (such as MySQL) to avoid future date-related issues. One common format is "Y-m-d H:i:s" which represents the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. Storing dates in this format ensures consistency and simplifies date manipulation and comparison tasks.

// Storing the current date and time in a standardized format
$currentDate = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
echo $currentDate;