The special character 'g' is not recognized as a formatter for the date function anymore... In, PHP3, it was defined as:
g - hour, 12-hour format without leading zeros; i.e. "1" to "12"
but it no longer works.  'm','d', 'Y', 'i', 's', and 'a' seem to work fine, though.
The following script will output "07.20.99 g:54:02 am", for example.
<?
        $today = date("m.d.Y g:i:s a");
        echo "$today<br><br>\n";
?>

FYI, my configure line was: ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-mysql --enable-track-vars