What best practices should be followed when implementing date-based conditional statements in PHP code?

When implementing date-based conditional statements in PHP code, it is important to use the correct date format and comparison operators to ensure accurate results. It is also recommended to consider time zones and use functions like strtotime() to convert dates to Unix timestamps for easier comparisons.

// Example of implementing a date-based conditional statement in PHP

$currentDate = date('Y-m-d');
$targetDate = '2022-12-31';

if (strtotime($currentDate) < strtotime($targetDate)) {
    echo "Current date is before the target date.";
} else {
    echo "Current date is on or after the target date.";
}