Drupal allows you to configure how dates and times are formatted and displayed (admin/settings/date-time). When making the format settings, you should probably consider the culture of your target audience. Below are suggested configurations for the "Default time zone" and "Configurable time zones" options.

For sites where most users live in a small geographic region:
Set the "Default time zone" to the time zone of the region and disable configurable time zones.

For sites where most users live in a region that spans a few time zones:
Set the "Default time zone" to the time zone usually considered to be the "standard" time zone and disable configurable time zones. For example, in the United States, you would set your site's time to the timezone that corresponds to Eastern Standard Time (EST).

For sites where users are likely to be scattered across the globe:
Set the "Default time zone" to the time zone to GMT (+0000) and enable configurable time zones.

Comments

elmota’s picture

elmota commented

so now that we configured thru admin panel the time zone to be a specific timezone, and set configurable to disabled, when i use Date function in PHP i expect the time to be according to the set timezone, but that is not happeneing, so how do i retrieve that set time and date without having to use the php function: date_default_timezone_set

elmota’s picture

elmota commented

i found what i was looking for:
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/format_date/6

infohata’s picture

infohata commented

yes, I have exactly same problem, with PHP 5.3 and up it comes the warning about the mandatory use of the timezone set function. Is there any quick fix to this besides ugly code patch?