How to store datetime from custom meta box so that it can be sorted by

Question

I have a custom meta boxe on a custom post type that has two date time fields. I will need to sort by these fields and also return posts that contain a date between two dates.

Will WordPress automatically store these dates as varchars? What will be the best format to save the date in so that I can query them?

Answer 1

Post meta is stored in the wp_postmeta table. Values are stored as longtext, not as dates or integers.

So your safest bet is to store these datetime fields as Unix timestamps. Then you can sort them using a meta query.