dealing with dates

Hi all, I posted earlier with some date questions, but realized I could probably do better with my question presented as such. I need to save the time date and time of posting for the records in a table. I then need to be able to search via a startdate and enddate text field where the user will be entering the date ranges as mm/dd/yyyy. What is the best way to handle adding the date to the MySQL record, and also how to search for that date based on a range in the above stated format? Thanks, Charles