Comments on: Being off by hours, Wordpress timezone change impact on archived posts and comments

By: Cheap prices, best value and everybody votes on Wii » Make You Go Hmm

Cheap prices, best value and everybody votes on Wii » Make You Go Hmm — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:22:55 +0000

[…] Behind the Hmmcast I realize the post time has been messed up on this blog again. Daylight savings has bitten the version of WordPress I’m using (haven’t verified if it’s fixed in the most recent version WP version yet). While the time shows as 4:20pm, it’s actually being published at 5:20pm because of the -8 offset in the settings. Instead of using the server time and adjusting it’s using a gmtdate offset without daylight savings calculated. If I change it to the correct time, then comments made between the last time I changed and now will be off by one hour. […]

By: Chipping the web - rock lobster -- Chip’s Quips

Chipping the web - rock lobster -- Chip’s Quips — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 01:50:48 +0000

[…] I love WordPress. It’s free, and it rocks. But I do wonder why they didn’t store timestamps in universal time to avoid problems like these. […]

By: TDavid

TDavid — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:22 +0000

pkelley - being on the other side of offering freeware for years, I hear what you’re saying. I wouldn’t dial up one of the Wordpress volunteer developers and bitch anybody out.

With this post I’m simply trying to explore the best way to deal with what I believe is a not completely rare situation. I do have one solution in mind, but will continue to wait and see if anybody else comes along and offers a better solution.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:33:14 +0000

That is a good point, engtech. Just ran a query to see how many posts fall between midnight and 3am that would be impacted by an actual date change: 204 of 4,140 (4.9%)

QUERY:
mysql> select ID, post_title, post_date from POSTS where HOUR(post_date) < 3;

Could change the time on these to midnight so the day does not roll back and the permalink therefore is not impacted. I notice the date_gmt is also saved. That would not break any permalink URLs that use date. This seems redundant to me. Why need both timestamps? If you already have GMT you can do a timezone offset for posts and comments (like I am talking about in the post in option #1).

Even though what you mention, engtech, would impact less than 5% of the posts, would probably be less of an issue just going with option #1 on all posts and comments made before a certain time and just rolling back the time programatically, this way not touching the data at all. I know where the timezone was changed, which is the key piece of information.

I will let this one stew for awhile and give others a chance to chime in before making a decision.

Edited 6:36am PST and 6:39am PST: Fixed the unclosed italicized text and removed a redundant sentence. Removed the post list, not really needed.

By: engtech

engtech — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:14:06 +0000

One thing to be careful of is that the permalink URL uses the date. Change the “day” the post happened on and you run the risk of breaking all of your URLs.

I had a friend do that when he tried to bump old posts to the front page.

By: pkelley

pkelley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:40:44 +0000

It is a pain, but I am glad that Wordpress is free. It is worth it’s weight in gold.

Just my opinion. Then again, I used to work support for a free audio player and had my head ripped off frequently.