Simplest way to display current month and year like “Aug 2016” in PHP?

Full version:

<? echo date('F Y'); ?>

Short version:

<? echo date('M Y'); ?>

Here is a good reference for the different date options.

update

To show the previous month we would have to introduce the mktime() function and make use of the optional timestamp parameter for the date() function. Like this:

echo date('F Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m')-1, 1, date('Y')));

This will also work (it’s typically used to get the last day of the previous month):

echo date('F Y', mktime(0, 0, 0, date('m'), 0, date('Y')));