Formatting the way the date/time is displayed
You can control way the date is displayed [admin/settings/date settings], or if it is displayed at all [admin/themes/configure/display post information on], in the main Drupal settings, but only to a certain extent.
If you want complete control over how the date is displayed, use PHP at the Theme level. This is from the disussions and is courtesy of Laura S.
At the top of your node.tpl.php file, add:
<?php
$formatted_date = format_date($node->created, 'custom', 'D j M Y');
?>Change the "D j M Y" part to what you require (see below for possible variables).
Then print or echo $formatted_date instead of $date. Look in your template for the string $date and replace it with $formatted_date.
To change the date/time display to your taste, arrange the following variables in the manner you require:
a - "am" or "pm"
A - "AM" or "PM"
d - day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros; i.e. "01" to "31"
D - day of the week, textual, 3 letters; i.e. "Fri"
F - month, textual, long; i.e. "January"
h - hour, 12-hour format; i.e. "01" to "12"
H - hour, 24-hour format; i.e. "00" to "23"
g - hour, 12-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"
G - hour, 24-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "0" to "23"
i - minutes; i.e. "00" to "59"
j - day of the month without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "31"
l (lowercase 'L') - day of the week, textual, long; i.e. "Friday"
L - boolean for whether it is a leap year; i.e. "0" or "1"
m - month; i.e. "01" to "12"
n - month without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"
M - month, textual, 3 letters; i.e. "Jan"
s - seconds; i.e. "00" to "59"
S - English ordinal suffix, textual, 2 characters; i.e. "th", "nd"
t - number of days in the given month; i.e. "28" to "31"
U - seconds since the epoch
w - day of the week, numeric, i.e. "0" (Sunday) to "6" (Saturday)
Y - year, 4 digits; i.e. "1999"
y - year, 2 digits; i.e. "99"
z - day of the year; i.e. "0" to "365"
Z - timezone offset in seconds (i.e. "-43200" to "43200")
Drupal 5.1 Garamond Difference
In Garamond (and possibly other themes) for 5.1 the procedure is different than described above. Go to Line 12 in node.tpl.php and change
format_date($node->created)
to
format_date($node->created, 'custom', 'M j, Y')
Substitute your own preference for: 'M j, Y' according to the info given in the original post.