Displaying posts with only upcoming dates according their custom field date value

Question

I got posts that have starting date as a custom field value. I'm displaying few of those posts in my sidebar in ascending order so that the post with closest starting date is shown first. This is what I have and it works great:

<?php query_posts('&post_type=events&posts_per_page=5&meta_key=start_date&orderby=meta_value&order=asc'); ?><?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?><li><span class="eventtext"><?php the_title(); ?></span>

But I was wondering, how could I filter the query so that it won't display posts with their starting dates already gone?

I've experimented with this:

$today = date('d/m/Y', strtotime('+2 hours'));
      query_posts(array(
      'post_type' => 'events',
      'posts_per_page' => 5,
      'meta_key' => 'start_date',
      'orderby' => 'meta_value',
      'order' => 'ASC',
      'meta_query' => array(
         array(
         'key' => 'start_date',
         'meta-value' => $value,
         'value' => 'start_date',
         'compare' => '>=',
         'type' => 'CHAR'
         )
      )
   ));

But it doesen't display anything. One thing to note is that the starting date value is saved in mm/dd/yyy -format, but changing the $today's date format haven't helped either.

UPDATE

So now I got this:

    <?php
$today = date('m/d/Y', strtotime('+2 hours'));
$the_query = new WP_Query( array(
      'post_type' => 'events',
      'posts_per_page' => 5,
      'meta_key' => 'start_date',
      'orderby' => 'meta_value',
      'order' => 'ASC',
      'meta_query' => array(
array(
         'key' => 'start_date',
'meta-value' => 'start_date',
         'value' => $today,
         'compare' => 'DATE',
         'type' => 'CHAR'
))
   ));
?>

Nothing shows up in the sidebar.

Note: the date is in that format since the posts are saved with the start_date custom field in that format. I'm just trying to get this work, then I'll change the date format to a more suitable one.

Answer 1

For this to work reliably, the date format in the database should be yyyy-mm-dd. Comparison type should be DATE or NUMERIC. If you take the date of 25-04-2012 in present format and compare it numerically to the date 26-04-1986, you can see what the issue will be: 25042012 < 26041986

ALso- if you're doing these queries in addition to your main loop, use a new instance of WP_Query.

EDIT-

there were a few errors you didn't fix. note that this still won't work quite right until you fix the date format.

<?php
$today = date('m/d/Y', strtotime('+2 hours'));
$the_query = new WP_Query( array(
  'post_type' => 'events',
  'posts_per_page' => 5,
  'meta_key' => 'start_date',
  'orderby' => 'meta_value',
  'order' => 'ASC',
  'meta_query' => array(
  array(
    'key' => 'start_date',
    'value' => $today,
    'compare' => '>=',
    'type' => 'DATE'
  ))
));
?>