For the ‘date of purchase’ field, I simply added the day and months items as <select> form controls. Then I got to the ‘year’ box, and realised that soon we’ll be leaving 2008 behind like a piece of temporal rubbish, and embracing the glistening newborn that will be 2009. I know the client wouldn’t really appreciate having to come back to me a month after his site goes live just so I can add a new year to the form, so I decided on the only sensible course of action a quality web designer like me could take, and made a super-simple php script to write the year into the form.

Here’s the php function:

function writePurchaseYear()
{
    $currentDate = getDate();
    $currentYear = $currentDate['year'];
    $startYear = 2008;
    $output = "<option value=\"2008\">2008</option>\n";

    if($currentYear - $startYear > 0)
    {
        for($i = $currentYear; $i >= $startYear; $i--)
        {
            $output = $output . "<output value=\"$i\">$i</option>\n";
        }
    }
    echo $output;
}

So, put that somewhere on the page that’s going to use it, and then, where you need the actual form control to be on the page, you need to put:

<select name="purchaseyear" id="purchaseyear">
    <option selected>----</option>
    <?php writePurchaseYear();?>
</select>

So there you have it. HTH, and all that.