title: Issue with date when integrating latest wordpress blog post into site using php
body: <p>I want to preface this with saying that my php knowledge is very novice and I am currently learning my way around the language via wordpress.</p>
  
  <p>The problem: I have a website where I'm integrating their 3 latest blog posts from wordpress into their footer. I have everything working fine except the date.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the snippet for my date:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="col-lg-2"&gt;
    &lt;div class="col-lg-12"&gt;
      &lt;h4&gt;&lt;?php the_date('d'); ?&gt;&lt;/h4&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;div class="col-lg-12"&gt;
      &lt;h4&gt;&lt;?php the_date('M'); ?&gt;&lt;/h4&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What I'm attempting to do is have the day and the month on two separate rows in html with the date on top of the month.</p>
  
  <p>When viewing this live it is only showing me the day for the particular snippet above, however, if I remove the php code the day it will then show the month.  </p>
  
  <p>Its like it can only show one or the other and not both at the same time.</p>
  
  <p>I'm sure there is something fundamental that I'm missing here.</p>
  
  <p>Any help on what is happening and how to correct the issue would be greatly appreciated!</p>