Actually, teryakisan seems to have found a great solution that works great.
When working with PHP's date() function, you must supply it with at least 2 parameters. How you want your input date formatted, and, of course, the input date itself.
It's actually easier if you learn to read it backwards.
Lets start (at the end) with $this->getCreateDate().
This function gets a MySQL formatted timestamp. Now, still going backwards, we'll use strtotime to convert the MySQL formatted timestamp to a UNIX formatted timestamp.
Here we use 'my' to tell to tell date() how to format the output (which is now a UNIX timestamp).
In this example,m is telling date() to return the numeric representation of the month, with leading zeros, and y is telling it to return a 2-digit representation of the year.
if you throw d in the middle, you get 'mdy', which of course will return the month, day and year in a 6-digit format such as 031512.
That would be March 15th 2012.
Given this info as a starting point, you should be able to figure out the rest yourself. Let us know how it goes.