I have read through all the issues and I have seen that a few people have brought up the issue about the time zone being non user friendly and I have to agree. I understand that the list of time zones is standard, but that is not an argument for keeping it un-user-friendly. I am embarrassed to have my users select from a huge list that isn't even alphabetized. The everyday user will be so overwhelmed by the list they will just ignore it or get frustrated. The reason why I have the date timezone installed is because I need the date field for cck. At the very least we should be given an option to just show a list of the 24 time zones or the list of names. Is this possible? Anyone have other ideas on how to make this more user friendly?

Comments

zagnutts’s picture

zagnutts commented

I wanted to clarify that I know the list is alphabetized, but not in an intuitive way. I am from chicago and I saw a bunch of states listed so I was looking for America/Illinois next to America/Indiana, but it wasn't there. Its just very confusing.

choster’s picture

choster commented

Do you have a specific suggestion for improving the "user-friendliness" of the listing? I submit the list is intuitive enough, for people speaking any language in any part of the world. The first time I used it, it took about three quarters of a second of scrolling to figure out it was sorted by continent and major city. That's less time than it took me in Windows, for instance, which is sorted by offset from GMT-- who thinks of New York as being "GMT-5" on any regular basis?

choster’s picture

choster commented

Marked #515926: User friendly timezones as an option., requesting customizable timezones as an option, as a duplicate of this issue.

I might nitpick and point out that America/New York is not the same as EST. For most of the year, in fact, it's EDT.

webkenny’s picture

webkenny commented

Sorry about the duplicate. It's a big issue queue with such a great module. Anyway, maybe I should rephrase. I think what I'm driving at is a "US Only" type of implementation as an option. Not necessarily "User Friendly" as I had put it since it's nation specific. Obviously for users on a non-US site, then my suggestion would be considered less user friendly. Depends on the locality.

I just don't agree that all users should have to wade through that many select options to find their timezone and US users are not used to "America/New_York" as a way to define their timezone.

(And yes, choster, nitpicking is fine since you're absolutely right. :) My mistake on that one)

I don't even think a patch is needed. This could be a "helper" module that is enabled only if needed. No need to bloat an already well thought out module.

codevoice’s picture

codevoice commented

Subscribe. I'm also embarrassed to display this list to users, they invariably are frustrated.

hanoii’s picture

hanoii
Primary language Spanish
Location 🇦🇷UTC-3
commented

subscribe

terbs’s picture

terbs commented

Yeah right now I'm trying to set my site's timezone to CST. I don't know any midwestern American cities and it's early in the morning so I've burned about 20 minutes and I'm super frustrated. I had to open up the module and look for some key/value pair to help me out. Can we at least compromise and display the offset next to the region? So each line is like: EST (GMT -4) America/New York

colan’s picture

colan
he/him
Primary language English
Location Toronto 🇨🇦
commented
Title: User Friendly Time Zones » Make the time zone list more user-friendly
Version: 6.x-2.0-rc6 » 7.x-2.x-dev
Category: task » feature

This is a feature request that would have to go into the D7 dev branch first.

Anyone have a patch that would restrict zones to particular region or country? That would be nice.

karens’s picture

karens commented

Timezones are handled by core in D7. I can't do anything about that.

colan’s picture

colan
he/him
Primary language English
Location Toronto 🇨🇦
commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Someone can reopen this if he/she has a patch then.

If I end up needing this, I'll post an update with some hook_form_alter() code.