Question

I previously asked a similar question, but still didn’t get a working answer.
So I have in my database a table wich contains informations about users(first_name,email…) and 2 fields containing the date of creation(“created”) and the date of update(“updated”).
the “updated” field has the type TIMESTAMP ,default =”CURRENT_TIMESTAMP”, attributs =”on Current_timestamp” . And the “created” field has type=”datetime” and not null default=”none”.
The problem is when displaying the date of creation, I got next to each user “0000-00-00 00:00:00”.
Here is the code that adds a user to the database:

$first_name = trim($_REQUEST['first_name']);
$last_name = trim($_REQUEST['last_name']);
$username = trim($_REQUEST['username']);
$password = trim($_REQUEST['password']);
$email = trim($_REQUEST['email']);
$created = strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", time());
$insert_sql = sprintf("INSERT INTO users (first_name, last_name, username, password, email, created)" .
"VALUES('%s', '%s', '%s', '%s', '%s', '%s');",
mysql_real_escape_string($first_name),
mysql_real_escape_string($last_name),
mysql_real_escape_string($username),
mysql_real_escape_string(crypt($password, $username)),
mysql_real_escape_string($email),
mysql_real_escape_string($created));
mysql_query($insert_sql) or die(mysql_error());

Please help, I tried various functions like date(), now() but still doesn’t work.

EDIT: that what my table shows:

mysql> SELECT updated, created from users;
+---------------------+---------------------+
| updated             | created             |
+---------------------+---------------------+
| 2012-09-21 09:09:49 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 2012-09-21 09:27:27 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 2012-09-22 11:36:19 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
| 2012-09-22 11:43:35 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
+---------------------+---------------------+

Answer 1

You are entering a string in a timestamp field; instead use the mysql function NOW(). Your query should be:

"INSERT INTO `users` (
     `first_name`,
     `last_name`,
     `username`,
     `password`,
     `email`,
     `created`) VALUES (
            '%s',
            '%s',
            '%s',
            '%s',
            '%s',
            NOW())"

Also, consider migrating to mysqli to take advantage of prepared statements.

To clarify the comments; it won’t matter what type the field is, as MySQL will know how to deal with it if you give it NOW():

mysql> create table temp (id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, ts TIMESTAMP, dt DATETIME);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> insert into temp values ('',NOW(),NOW()),('',NOW(),NOW());
Query OK, 2 rows affected, 2 warnings (0.08 sec)
Records: 2  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from temp;
+----+---------------------+---------------------+
| id | ts                  | dt                  |
+----+---------------------+---------------------+
|  1 | 2012-09-22 13:38:50 | 2012-09-22 13:38:50 |
|  2 | 2012-09-22 13:38:50 | 2012-09-22 13:38:50 |
+----+---------------------+---------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

It won’t work, if you try to insert UNIX_TIMESTAMP():

mysql> insert into temp values ('',UNIX_TIMESTAMP(),UNIX_TIMESTAMP());
Query OK, 1 row affected, 3 warnings (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from temp order by id desc limit 1;
+----+---------------------+---------------------+
| id | ts                  | dt                  |
+----+---------------------+---------------------+
|  7 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |
+----+---------------------+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)