Dates
As a rule of thumb, always pass dates to Smarty as timestamps. This allows template designers to use the date_format modifier for full control over date formatting, and also makes it easy to compare dates if necessary.
When using {html_select_date} in a template, the programmer will most likely want to convert the output from the form back into timestamp format. Here is a function to help you with that.
See also {html_select_date}, {html_select_time}, date_format and $smarty.now,