Gravity Forms & Advanced Custom Fields - php

Question

I've successfully created the dropdown menu to auto populate the appropriate information from an Advanced Custom Field I created called 'date' on site http://albertson.staging.wpengine.com/seminars/.
Followed along with the instructions here:
http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/Dynamically_Populating_Drop_Down_Fields
The only issue I'm having is how to display the date in a "pretty" format. You can see that the date is all numbers (20140129) instead of 01/28/2014
To display the date appropriately in the seminar sections above (border red) I use:
<?php if( get_field('date')): ?>
<?php
$date = get_field('date');
// $date = 19881123 (23/11/1988)
// extract Y,M,D
$y = substr($date, 0, 4);
$m = substr($date, 4, 2);
$d = substr($date, 6, 2);
// create UNIX
$time = strtotime("{$d}-{$m}-{$y}");
// format date (November 11th 1988)
echo date('M d', $time);
?>
How do I pass this same information within the Gravity Forms Function I created to get the date to display nicely? Below is my function for Gravity Forms so far.
add_filter('gform_pre_render_4', 'populate_dates');
function populate_dates($form){
foreach($form['fields'] as &$field){
if($field['type'] != 'select' || strpos($field['cssClass'], 'populate-dates') === false)
continue;
// you can add additional parameters here to alter the posts that are retreieved
// more info: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/get_posts
$currentdate = date("Y-m-d",mktime(0,0,0,date("m"),date("d"),date("Y")));
$events = get_posts(array(
'post_type' => 'seminars',
'orderby' => 'date',
'order' => 'ASC',
'meta_query'=> array(
array(
'key' => 'date',
'compare' => '>=',
'value' => $currentdate,
'type' => 'DATE',
)),
'meta_key' => 'date',
));
// update 'Select a Post' to whatever you'd like the instructive option to be
$choices = array(array('text' => 'Select a Date', 'value' => ' '));
foreach($events as $post){
$choices[] = array('text' => $post->date, 'value' => $post->date);
}
$field['choices'] = $choices;
}
return $form;
}

Answer 1

Sounds like you're looking for PHP's date function. We convert the date string to a timestamp via strtotime() and then use date() to format the date as you wish.
$formatted_date = date( 'm/d/Y', strtotime( $post->date ) );
In your code example:
foreach( $events as $post ){
$formatted_date = date( 'm/d/Y', strtotime( $post->date ) );
$choices[] = array('text' => $formatted_date, 'value' => $post->date );
}