best way to save and use date

jrahma

Hi,

I have a PHP project. I want to know what's the best way to save the date for a post in MySQL so it can be shown in a local time of the user.

For example if the local time in 00:00 in UAE and it's 09:99 in USA and a user in based in UAE created a post it will show created in 00:00 but if a user based in USA viewed the same post it will show created in 09:00

I am not sure how to explain this more but hope it's clear..

Thanks
Jassim

Weedpacket

Personally I store it in UTC, and store the user's timezone with the user's information. An alternative to UTC is a DBMS with a date/time types that store timezone information and can account for it internally.

jrahma

Weedpacket;11035021 wrote:
Personally I store it in UTC, and store the user's timezone with the user's information. An alternative to UTC is a DBMS with a date/time types that store timezone information and can account for it internally.

What if the user travelled or relocated? In this case he will need to login and update his timezone!

I am thinking how Facebook, LinkedIn or twitter is doing it?

traq

UTC is the best way. Deal with it exclusively, and then convert to local time only when you're ready to show it to the user (or, serve UTC and let javascript take care of conversion - then you don't need to track timezones at all if you don't want to (though it will often still be best to do so)).