In a past post, we covered "How to Customize and Theme Post and Date info in Drupal". That works well for node theming but we were also recently called upon by a client to do this for a view, specifically for an events page that displayed event dates themed the very same way in a nice square block. When the view was created, there seemed to be no way to break apart month, day and year in separate span tags in order to have all the goodness to custom theme a date block in Drupal.

Finally we came across a post on Drupal.org that ultimately led us to do what we wanted. Here are the steps to do this:

1. Go to "admin/settings/date-time/formats"
2. In configure go to the bottom of the page and add a new Date format, we used: "Date elements in DIV's"
3. Click "save configuration"
4. Go to "add format"
5. In the "Format string:" box add the following code:

You now have this date format available system wide in Drupal that will give you a themable date format. Once you choose this format in Views, you can then theme month, day and year as you please with a background or whatever you like. Note that when you choose your date field in your view, be sure to look for the drop down menu that says "Date elements in DIV's"

The only caveat with this is that if you choose to use this format in nodes, you can't use the pop up date picker, rather you will need to use drop downs but the end result is the same.