How to store and display date in dd-mm-yy format in Joomla?

I am developing开发者_运维知识库 a component in Joomla. Through my component I want to store timestamp to "lastaccessed" field.

My problem is that, if I am simply storing the date, then MySQL is displaying it as "0000-00-00 00:00:00"

I am using the PHP date function like this:

$row->date_lastaccessed=date();

How can I store and retrieve the date in my format (dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss ampm)?

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Have you looked at:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php