I was wondering is there a way to format the date to reflect the local customs for presenting it (mm/dd/yy)?
Inside config.inc.php you can set $config['date_formats'] with all of the formats you want available to the user.
$config['date_formats'] = ['m-d-Y', 'n-d-Y', 'd-m-Y', 'Y-m-d', 'Y-d-m', 'm/d/Y', 'n/d/Y', 'd/m/Y', 'Y/m/d', 'Y/d/m'];
You can have as many value options as you want, from 1 to a dozen(s). The format values (m-d-y) follow PHP date format. (https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php)
I did see that you can change the format for how it looks but not necessarily change the placement of day/month/year values.
This confuses me. The dates are stored in the database in database format, and all we are ever doing is changing how it looks in the web interface.