Learned something new about Wordpress.

For quite some time I’ve wanted to use Pacific Standard Time on this blog instead of Eastern Standard Time. Nothing against you east coasters, but I don’t live on the east coast and I’ve been making manual timezone changes in my head instead of doing the simpler thing: just change the timezone. Admittedly, this is a selfish change, but there is probably nobody else in the world that spends as much time at this site as me, so I might as well have the clock set to my home zone, right?

A more logical change would allow every reader and author to set their preferred timezone and perhaps a WP plugin or core operation adjusts the timestamp displayed to match the clock. Maybe a Wordpress plugin exists out there to handle that already (or maybe it’s already a part of being a registered/logged in user)? A long time ago I created some Javascript code that worked in tandem with PHP to figure out the time set on the computer and display that. Suppose I could conjure that code and bring it into a plugin or something. Only problem there is that if the person’s computer clock is wrong or they aren’t running javascript (or blocking javascript) then the times have to revert to a default setting. For my uses elsewhere years ago, this was a fine solution. That would probably work here too.

How to change the timezone
If you go into the Wordpress Admin->Options and change the timezone, it doesn’t actually alter the timestamps of the posts and comments, which means that by switching from right coast (EST) to left coast (PST) all existing posts and comments would now display off by three hours when PST is added to the end of the timestamp.

Every archived post before this one as of this writing, in fact, are now indeed off by three hours. The times displayed are actually EST and yet the PST I added to the templates is wrong. Aren’t timezones fun?

A few solutions came to mind
Being a programmer, this got me thinking about the best way to deal with the situation.

1) adjust the timestamp on the fly. Pros: no need to change the database, a one or two liner piece of code. Cons: forces dynamic script to run when the time isn’t going to change. Not the most efficient solution.
2) find or create myself a script to cycle through the WP database and change all the timestamps for every archived post and comment. Pros: permanent change in the database, no additional run time scripting needed. Cons: unless there is a plugin or mod script already written, I’ll need to create the code myself

A core Wordpress change would be to use GMT for everything and then offset the displayed time based on user settings dynamically. This way nobody would ever have to go into the database and make manual time data changes when a timezone has been changed. That is how I’ve dealt with timezone concerns in programs like these. In fact, last month I shared how to write a program using PHP that showed how to calculate days in the future and incorporates timezones changes.

This seems like buggy architecture that you can easily change the time in the WP admin area but if you do this to an already established blog it doesn’t fix the past, it only changes the future, and it doesn’t tell the user this is happening. The only way I noticed this was happening was by making a comment and seeing the comments out of order. On further investigation I saw every post was out of order too. I was able to fix them easily by manually editing the timestamps, but no way would anybody do this with thousands of posts and comments manually. That’s what scripting is for.

Sure, I realize it’s only three hours, big deal, right? Maybe option #3 is not to bother with this at all but this is the kind of nitpicky thing that us programmer types get wrapped up in sometimes. Ok, won’t speak for others, just myself, it’s the kind of detail I get wrapped up in sometimes.

v2.1.0 has same issue
Hoping maybe with the new Wordpress 2.1.0 maybe this was one of the 500+ bugs that was fixed, I decided to investigate that option on another blog.

I checked out the situation on our group blog VTOR and switched from EST to PST and the same problem there. PST makes good sense there because Second Life time or SL time as it’s sometimes called is PST. New posts and comments have the correct timestamp but the archived ones are still off by three hours just like here. So upgrading to the newest version and changing the time doesn’t fix this issue.

BTW, some might not consider this a bug at all. To me it’s a bug because the user behavior assumes that by changing the timezone all their posts, not just new posts, will be displayed correctly. Giving the user no message or warning that old posts won’t be changed is problematic.

Answers at Wordpress support?
I did a little poking around in the Wordpress support area to see if anybody had whipped up some code that would cycle through all the old posts and comments and fix the timestamp and didn’t see any fixes. A few people suggested appending “T” to the date code, but that shows the server timezone and isn’t altered by the routine that kicks out the time in Wordpress. Also the newer ‘e’ date code is only available in PHP 5.1.5+. I also did a few Google queries. Didn’t find anything promising right away. Maybe I’m just using the wrong queries to find what I’m looking for.

Before I sit down and write what is probably less than 10-15 lines of code, and if I do that I’ll gladly share the code with others, I thought I’d make a post here first and see if any other Wordpress users have run into this situation and already created this code or used a plugin to fix this quickly and easily.

I’m not the first person using Wordpress who wanted to change the timezone midstream that had this happen, at least Sterling is in the club too. Did everybody else not care if the times on their posts and comments were off by hours? Maybe I shouldn’t care either. The future posts and comments will show correctly now so it’s only the past that’s off — by three hours. But according to current stats that is nearly 9,000 comments and over 4,000 posts that are off.

I could just blame it on the Twilight Zone.

What do you think?

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• How to insert timestamps into web forms using Firefox plugin
• Wordpress Plugin and Mod Competition
• How to identify and remove Wordpress comment spam MySQL queries
• Prices, eWallet, everybody votes on Wii and dealing with DST in Wordpress
• [free code] How to import from Pivot 1.2x to Wordpress 1.5x
• Keeping count of the published and unpublished words on your Wordpress blog