Hi, I have found myself in a position where I need to support correct
times across timezones. I'd love any advice and gotchas from those
experienced in timezone management of a Cake app.

I have gotten a bit bewildered by the complexity by something that
looks to simple on the face of it. I need to support time-conversions
correctly and I don't really see full support for it in either Cake or
PHP.

The Basics:
The server may be in a different timezone from the user and users may
be in different timezones.
Times in "incoming" data (posts, uploads...) need to be converted to
"Server Time".
Times for display need to be converted to "Client Time".

Some complexities:
You can't sniff the client timezone from the server-side without
(reportedly unreliable) ip-geolocation lookups from the non-free
providers (reportedly less unreliable). So, I need javascript or I
need to ask the user to choose. I'd like to avoid asking the user.
Some timezones use DST. Some do not.
Dates when DST are in effect vary from location to location... and
(big sigh) year to year.

That is basically the broad view of my knowledge of the problems
involved in time-conversions. Am I making things needlessly
complicated for myself? I really need the timestamps to be correct for
the type of app I am developing. Serious things can happen if they get
screwed up by only an hour. The kind of things that cause multi-
million dollar lawsuits and put companies out of business. I don't
want that. :)

Please fire away with your advice and experience on this topic.
/Martin

Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://cakeqs.org and help others with 
their CakePHP related questions.

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"CakePHP" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected] For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en

To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.

Reply via email to