A warning at admin/reports/status says "The Date Timezone module requires you to set the site timezone name." And admin/settings/date-time says "Select the default site time zone. If in doubt, choose the timezone that is closest to your location which has the same rules for daylight saving time."

We're really selecting a city or place that happens to be in the same time zone. If we were selecting a time zone, we would see 24 selections for named time zones (e.g., "central standard time") plus a few more for the weird time zones ("Newfoundland"?).

Comments

choster’s picture

choster commented

I disagree. There are 24 offsets, whereas there are potentially an infinite number of timezones, as a time zone is a political creation. You are indeed picking the timezone whose rules are closest to where you are, not whose location is.

aren cambre’s picture

aren cambre commented

Virtually everything in that list is places, not time zones. For example:

  • Africa/Windhoek
  • Africa/Nouakchott
  • America/Cancun
  • America/Managua
  • Asia/Dili
  • Asia/Dili
  • Europe/Isle_of_Man

And even then, the list is arbitrary. It has Chicago but not Dallas or Houston?

karens’s picture

karens commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Those are the official timezone names. They happen to also be place names because the official timezone names are in the format CONTINENT/CITY. The names you are used to, like US/Central, are actually deprecated. There is a lot of info about this in the Drupal handbook (http://drupal.org/node/291799) and in Advanced Help (if you have the Advanced Help module enabled). The Drupal handbook is borked right now because the handbook page links got goofed up during the D6 upgrade making it hard to find all the dozens of pages of documentation about these things, so I suggest using Advanced Help.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.