Hello everyone,
I've never used the Zend Framework before, and starting a new application I
have a particular concern surrounding the best way to store dates. I really
want to make sure that what I'm thinking is the best way to go about it,
since it could be difficult to change later on.
I'm expecting in my application users from different timezones, and it's
important that the users see the correct timezone.
For example, if "Joe" posts a message at noon in Australia, other users in
Australia should see "Posted by Joe at 12pm" - but users in England should
of course see "Posted by Joe at 2am" (or whatever).
I was thinking the best way to go about this would be to first of all ask
users when they register what timezone they're in by allowing them to choose
from the list PHP provides. Then in the bootstrap, using
date_default_timezone_set to set this.
We'll represent all dates with an object of Zend_Date.
When we save a date in the database we will use
Zend_Date::setTimezone('UTC') - so all the timestamp will be in UTC - and
then Zend_Date::get() to get the timestamp to save. So all timestamps in the
database will be in UTC.
Then when we retrieve a date from the database, we'll use $date = new
Zend_Date($timestamp, 'UTC') - from the tests I've done, it looks like this
will return a time in the timezone based off the current timezone which we
can then display to the user.
Now my question is firstly: will that work? Can anyone see any problems with
doing that? But also: is this the best way to do it? Are there any other
ways anyone can recommend? Like I say, I really want to start with the best
practice to save headaches later - any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks :)
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