Making time for mktime; Counting down in PHP

There’s plenty of date and time functions for PHP… there’s mktime() which returns a UNIX timestamp, time() returns current Unix timestamp, strtotime which formats a string into a unix timestamp etc etc… Maybe I’m just dumb, but I’m getting a tad bit confused here… isn’t there a best practice of sorts?

Not only is there plenty of functions performing similar things, there’s a bunch of converters for different timezones, and probably a whole different set of stuff to deal with timestamps coming from MySQL databases.

And all I wanted was a dead simple countdown script, a “days until”-kind of thing. Well, anyhow, I think I got it working, If anybody sees this, please let me know if this is insane or not:

function countdown($year=2006,$month=1,$day=12) {
    $event = mktime(7, 0, 0, $month, $day, $year);
    $now = time()+7200; // +2 hours, my "local timezone"
    $diff = ceil(($event - $now) / (1 * 24 * 60 * 60));
    return $diff;
}

Patched together from php.net comments and some trial-and-error, all it does is to count down the days until the arrival… all -1050 of them…

hmm… reading what I just posted, I see the relative dates-plugin being used on my own site… Guess I could have used that instead of spending half an hour reading about date and time functions. lesson learned. onwards.