php date and handling time zones

rremm2000

I'm wondering what is the best approach for handling times zones, I've been thinking about it and I can't think of a reason why I actually need a time zone for anything...

I guess I've talked my self out of using it. My site has user profiles, forum, user submitted stories and they can search profiles by country, state, city and zipcode.

Actually I did think of one of a reason why I could use time zones which would be showing the last time/date the user was on line according to their time. But it seems pretty trivial.

So I'm wondering if anyone else is actually using time zones and what you are using them for, and if you feel it's important to your site.

Anyway thanks

fean0r

Users prefer to think in there own time so if someone makes a post at 1pm it may show as 12 noon in 1 time zone and 2pm in another but each user see the time accurately in there own time.

For example all the forums I use throughout the world show the time information as GMT.

It is simple for you to show all times on your site according to that users profile setting so I'd recommend coding in timezones.

rremm2000

I was looking at the php constants but not sure if I understand what it's used for yet
for example they have

timezone_abbreviations_list()

But doesn't seem to output anything I see as useful related to date()

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [dst] => 1
            [offset] => -14400
            [timezone_id] => America/Porto_Acre
        )

[1] => Array
    (
        [dst] => 1
        [offset] => -14400
        [timezone_id] => America/Eirunepe
    )

[2] => Array
    (
        [dst] => 1
        [offset] => -14400
        [timezone_id] => America/Rio_Branco
    )

[3] => Array
    (
        [dst] => 1
        [offset] => -14400
        [timezone_id] => Brazil/Acre
    )

)

don't I need something like +/- XX hours from GMT
I could not find and explanation for offset and dst?

Does anyone know if anyone has made a SQL table for timezones?

It seems I could add it to my ZipCode table and then undate the user profiles.

NogDog

The 'offset' values in that array are in seconds. But you don't really need to do the conversions yourself. If using a recent enough version of PHP (>= 5.1.0), you can just use the [man]date_default_timezone_set/man function.