[Gigablah]

From the article: "Databases rarely handle timezones, daylight savings time and rule changes correctly, so avoid the database specific functionality all together."

The article isn't "picking on" PHP, it's highlighting that timezone rules are constantly changing (which is not a language-specific problem) and details how to handle them (e.g. using an extension that's updated more frequently).

[gaius]

Date/time handling code is pretty tricky - not leveraging what's in your platform is going to suck up a lot more time than you think. As for "databases rarely..." the answer to that is not to hand-roll your own wheel in PHP but to get a better database.