First, I want to say a big THANK YOU for the event module, and all the
work on Drupal. I found Drupal a month ago and have been learning
how it works. I have been trying different modules and waiting on 4.7 to
be completed. I was very excited to see 4.7 complete, it is amazing
to see all of the work put in by so many people on an awesome program.

I was going to use 4.6 but I am building a site for youth groups and they
have alot of repeating events, so I wanted to use the repeating event
module. I have been having a few problems though with the event module,
and I have searched the forums and not sure if it is something in my
system or not.

I am using the following:
Apache
php 4.4.1
mysql 3.23
Drupal 4.7 (clean install as of yesterday)
Event 4.7 (april 4, 06)

I have times not configurable by user. All users will be in the same
timezone and I thought it would make things more confusing for them. My
timezone is GMT-700 right now, but GMT-800 in the winter.

1. i have tried to change the the "Event time zone display" to "Use the
sitewide time zone", but it changes back to "Use the event's time zone"
after I save configuration. Other changes remain though.

2. I looked through the module and tried to understand where things are
so i could understand some of the forum questions and answers. (I am not
anywhere near an expert on php, nor other programming) I have seen the
Daylight Savings Time section, but I have not seen a place that it shows
up for one to mark whether we are or are not in an area for Daylight
Savings time. Is this automatic by the zone on sitewide time? I am not
sure whether I can change the sitewide time when daylight time changes or
not.

I am sorry if I am asking these questions before Event 4.7 is complete.
If that is the case, I can wait for that. Thank you again for everything
and taking the time to read my questions

Comments

nydrupalfan’s picture

nydrupalfan commented
Title: Time Zone Display and Daylight Savings time problems/questions » Patch available

Switching the site timezone screwed up event start times until I applied this patch:
http://drupal.org/node/56189

I'm not sure how much it has been tested yet, so use with caution initially.

nydrupalfan’s picture

nydrupalfan commented
Title: Patch available » Time Zone Display and Daylight Savings time problems/questions
LoneWolfOne’s picture

LoneWolfOne commented

I read that problem before I posted and tried it. Since you posted it I tried it again. I changed lines 190-193 of 4.7 event.module dated March 28, 2006. It took one hour off of each of my events (in viewing the event, it shows as 6:00 pm, in edit it is listed as 7:00pm) In testing the patch, the event times were not affected when I changed my site time, exactly as you stated in testing the patch. I am not sure why it is changing the view vs edit times though. I entered events in basicevent type, for May 4th and then Dec 4th so that I would have events before and after the DST issue. My time is set to -700. (when I go to creat>event the times showing are 2 hours behind the current time...not sure about that either)

nydrupalfan’s picture

nydrupalfan commented

Did you also see this issue? There is a problem with the 12 hour input form that was introduced with a recent cvs commit. Replacing some older code fixes the bug.

http://drupal.org/node/52481

lanesharon’s picture

lanesharon commented

I live in Arizona. We are one of two states that does not follow DST. So, this is really driving me a little wacky. I have to constantly check to make sure that I have added (or is it subtracted) 1. LOL Wish there was a way to not do the DST routine!

spoggle’s picture

spoggle commented

When the drop down menus get set up in 12 hour mode, it looks like the index returned by the form is off by 1 (i.e. 5 is index 4, 4 is index 3, etc), it doesn't have anything to do with DST. It seems that the index is used directly for the hour so you get a time one hour earlier than expected. The work around is to use a 24 hour clock (the indices work out there because time runs from 0 to 24). Being a Drupal hacker for all of about 8 hours, I've not quite figured out the patch yet..

chrisschaub’s picture

chrisschaub commented
Title: Time Zone Display and Daylight Savings time problems/questions » Time Zone Setting - Why?

Ok, I've been using and trolling thru the event module code. I can't see any reason to use time zones for this type of module. People using the calendar don't care about the user or site timezone for an event, they care about the timezone of the event location. So, I might be in California looking at an event in Chicago, but I always assume (as do mosts people) that dates/times are listed in the local timezone. So, an event at 8pm is always 8pm in the local timezone.

I understand that virtual events span many timezones, but the module doesn't take into account the browser's timezone from what I can tell. This would be very useful if you want to make the times all relative to the user.

With all of the hosting date/time config issues and the differences in platforms, I'm hoping this code can be removed and just store the date/time in the database as a date/time column. Unless I'm missing some huge benefit from this type of feature?

Also, as you know, calendars are not all standard across the globe. There are states in the USA that refuse to honor daylight savings even though a server being hosted in that state might honor it. Very confusing and hard to handle with straight TZ settings. I suggest you simplify this since it will probably never work as is and leads to confusion. To set it up correctly, you have to know the TZ of your server to get the offset correct for the sitewide timezone. This is beyond most users IMHO.

Thanks for your indulgence and hard work.

chrisschaub’s picture

chrisschaub commented

Just to add a bit more. I think having a tZ setting would be coold for users that are logged into the site. But what about anonymous users? Their TZ is null by default. So, my above comments about the whole TZ thing still stand. Just store the date/times as a formatted date string in the database. A separate item could be added to the date display which would either read the logged in users timezone or the browser javascript object (self.request.locale ?) and make a guess as to what to display. Wouldn't this be better? Please, throw darts at my suggestion, I really want to know why this is a key feature for this mod.

oadaeh’s picture

oadaeh commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

In regards to the original posting:

Item 1. That behaviour is by design. Read the text under the radio buttons.
Item 2. What you found is help text only. You can view it by going to http://www.yourdomainname.com/event/dst. There is no support for DST in the event module, other than what is in the time zones.

All the rest of the comments are dealt with in other bugs, AFAICT.