Time Zone confusion

I don't want Events to be concerned with time zones either. What ever time the user enters should be on the calendar. I don't want it being translated based on the viewer's time zone. The reason is that if someone wants to attend the meeting, they will have to be there in person, so they will be in that time zone, not their home zone.

+1

And in addition to that: since Drupal still doesn't support daylight savings time, you have to manually adjust the timezone of the site twice a year, if you want to display the correct daytimes. A quick check shows that the event daytimes are unchanged when you change the site from, say Etc/GMT+1 to Etc/GMT+2 (or back). This is good and needs to be preserved!

On second thought: if it's an on-line meeting, the daytimes should be adjusted. I guess it needs to be configurable — yet another option to add to the UI (and the database table)...

The first part of my confusion is that my site seems to know that it is not in the GMT zone, even though I try to say I am. How do I get the whole site to ignore time zones?

If you set your sitewide timezone to GMT, that's what it should use...

What ever time the user enters should be on the calendar. I don't want it being translated based on the viewer's time zone.

Turn off user configurable timezones and set it to use the event's time zone.

Michelle

#3: Turn off user configurable timezones

Turning user configurable timezones on or off is a much larger issue than configuring the Event module. You can't expect a site to set this to accommodate one module.

Besides, a site can easily have events of both types, some that should be adjusted, and some that should remain fixed.

@salvis - This is a support request, not a feature request, so I can only tell her how to work with what's there.

@nancy - Time zones make my head spin but I'm taking a shot at it.

1) ?q=admin/settings/event/timezone <-- Both set to sitewide also set to 12 hour
2) ?q=admin/settings/date-time Default time zone: +0000 Configurable time zones: disabled Date formats showing GMT times like in your screenshot.

The event I had already prior to changing from Central to GMT has the wrong times on now.
The event I just added after changing to GMT has the correct times.

Were the events you're having problem with created before setting the time zone to GMT?

Michelle

Sigh... After doing all that, it dawned on me that my test site is on V1 still. So this is probably all moot. :( I need to do a bit more testing with V1 and then I'll upgrade it to V2 and try it again.

Michelle

I mark this as closed since this applied to 5.1 not 5.2.

Time zones are killing me as well, now I understand why you haven't been able to answer my questions via timezone with your module.

Does the location where your server is have anything to do with this? Or does it get converted by the sites time zone?

Nobody seems to know over at CCK. So I thought I would ask a more active crowd over here.

If you use CCK dates for an event type (without hour-minute granularity,so no time zones), How do you avoid the "View argument date summary "1 off" problem?

"Me-to" on 6.x-2.x-dev. I actually think this is a bug, not a support issue. When user-defined timezones are enabled, all hell starts breaking loose with event times. Disable user-defined timezones and sanity returns. This is on a very basic Drupal without CCK or Date.

Here's an example:

- Set up event so that the user creating the event can choose the timezone
- Set up event so events are displayed using the event time zone.
- Create an event for US East Cost, say 8pm Saturday.
- Set a user to the first timezone in the list - Africa/Addis Ababa. Say it's Saturday 5pm EST, which makes it some time Sunday in Africa.
- Event will not show up in "upcoming events", as it is Saturday EST but it's now Sunday in Africa. Looks like the conversion doesn't happen.
- Now set up event so events are displayed using the user's time zone.
- The event still does not show up in "incoming events", although the calendar now shows the event correctly on "Sunday"
- When going into the event manually, it shows as "Start: 03/08/2009 3:00 am End: 03/08/2009 6:00 am Timezone: America/New York" - these are the translated start and end times, but showing the original timezone, which is very, very confusing.
- If the site time zone differs from the event time zone, similar things happen. On an Addis Ababa site with an EST event, the event will not show up in "upcoming events".

Only way around that that I've found is to disable user time zones, and not quite sure what I'll do about the site timezone issue. For a site with a global user base, this can get to be a major issue.

Event for Drupal 8 is unrelated to older versions. If an issue similar to this one exists, please open a new issue with the 8.x branch.