Change name of Laravel's created_at and updated_at

The accepted answer may cause problems with updating timestamps unfortunately.

You'd better override consts on your model:

const CREATED_AT = 'post_date';
const UPDATED_AT = 'post_modified';

then methods getCreatedAtColumn and getUpdatedAtColumn will return post_date and post_modified respectively, but won't do any harm.

For the other columns you need use events like @Oni suggested.

If you look into the source of the Eloquent class

https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/4.2/Eloquent/Model.php#L223-L235

You should be able to change these column names pretty easily by overriding those constants.

<?php

class YourModel extends Eloquent {

    /**
     * The name of the "created at" column.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    const CREATED_AT = 'post_date';

    /**
     * The name of the "updated at" column.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    const UPDATED_AT = 'post_modified';

}

As for the _gmt version of those timestamps, you might want to look into events. Here is a good start

http://driesvints.com/blog/using-laravel-4-model-events