Improve the Timezone Picker

I like the ubuntu one where it highlight the whole timezone.

We do already highlight the whole timezone, except for the international ocean waters. I've investigated this a little bit but oceanic timezone shapes are a little hard to come by. We probably don't need to be perfect and we could probably generate shape files based off the rules outlined at http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/ (which is the source of the shape files that timezone picker is based on). I'm guessing that clicking on the ocean would probably do some math to figure out which capital city is geographically closest and select that timezone.

Regarding simplification, we can simply turn off the border around countries to clean up the appearance, though I find the borders helpful in most situations. More importantly it helps make it so that all the borders are seamless by covering up the small gaps between countries. Again something that could probably be fixed with some better shapefile-foo. Both problems should probably be left to the timezone picker project itself, and as it improves upstream we can update our implementation.

For starters I've built a contrib project based on the JavaScript library that makes headway on what changes are needed for this to be part of core: http://drupal.org/project/timezone_picker. It creates a new form element of #type 'timezone_picker'.

I was also discussing in IRC yesterday with Gabor and others, apparently we ask for the "Default country" as part of the installer, but this setting does absolutely nothing. It was added as part of #333156: Add ability to configure site default country but future improvements were never made. As part of building this timezone picker into the installer, I think we should kill the visible "Default country" select list option as part of the installer and base it off the timezone in a hidden field. That way we can keep the functionality and promise of the default country option, while not bothering end users with setting the option.

(edit) and as I've learned, it seems that there is no permanent inhabitant of antartica, we don't need to show it on the map.

I cropped off Antartica in the image from http://drupal.org/project/timezone_picker. We didn't have timezone data for Antartica in the image map anyway.

I don't plan on implementing this. Anyone interested please reopen.

Thanks @cweagans, that's fine with me. It's even fine if the same library *is* used, but it's just not something I'll be working on.