Event Date as Custom field

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_Custom_Fields

Store the date in the format yyyy-mm-dd in the custom field. Then once it’s been retrieved, use PHP to break the date string down into year, month and day for display.

How do I do that? I don’t know enough about PHP to break apart the string.

<?php
//for this post, get custom field "event_date" which should be in yyyy-mm-dd format and display as to month, day
//2011-02-22 will display as February 22
$event_date = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'event_date', true);
$event_date = '2011-02-22';
if ($event_date) {
echo 'The event date is '. date('F j', strtotime($event_date));
}
?>

For the date(‘F j’… options see Formatting_Date_and_Time.

Great! But how do I add css to each string element?

echo '<span class="yourspanclass here">bThe event date is '. date('F j', strtotime($event_date)) . '</span>';

Related:
CSS

Yeah, but wont the entire date be styled the same? I want to style the ‘F’ differently than the ‘j’

You’d have to use two instances of date.

date('F', strtotime($event_date))
date('j', strtotime($event_date))

ohhh, ok thank you!

I had a similar issue and i was able to figure it out thanks to this post! I really appreciate it!

I have a similar problem – I want the widget calendar to display a post on a given date not on the date that the post was created.

Any clues?
-rich