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An update that will fix some bugs we discovered related to users who set their WordPress Timezone to a Manual Offset from UTC.
Posted by Darren Ethier
This post is important news for any Event Espresso 4 user who has their WordPress website using a UTC offset for its timezone setting instead of a timezone string (e.g. city/region). If you have your website set to use a timezone string (e.g. a city/region) then you will not be affected by anything in this post. Check Your Date and Time Settings! – Log in to your WordPress website and navigate to: Settings > General > Timezone
Are you a developer? You may be interested in our developer blog post that goes into more technical details: Upcoming Changes to the Datetime System
An update is coming that will fix some bugs we discovered related to users who set their WordPress Timezone to a Manual Offset from UTC. We wanted to give some heads up on this update because it could impact the dates and times on your Event Espresso powered website. Here’s a rough outline of this post for those of you who want to skim to the parts that impact you:
Every WordPress website has the option to set what you want to use as the timezone setting. In WordPress UTC offsets are an option for backward compatibility but are really a horrible option for user’s to use for a few reasons:
We have been warning users about using UTC offsets for a while, even going so far as to adding a warning if they create their first event using a UTC offset for their timezone. Despite this, many of our users continue to use UTC offsets and so we have tried to support this.
As a part of supporting UTC offsets, we’ve done the following things in Event Espresso:
This means, that for the most part, Event Espresso would work with timezone strings instead of UTC offsets and consistently apply that to all saved dates and times within our system and thus to correctly account for things like DST etc. for the majority of our users who have their website set to a UTC offset.
The problems we recently uncovered are:
Most users do not experience trouble with how things were currently setup because for the most part, website owners set their timezone setting once and don’t change them. So even though Event Espresso would be converting UTC offsets incorrectly internally, the user wouldn’t notice anything because Event Espresso would converting it consistently. Where this becomes a problem however is:
Once we became aware of the problem, we recognized it needed fixed because we don’t want anyone to run into this problem when they do change their timezone settings or when we release new features.
In the next update of EE4 (4.9.47.p) , we’re going to release an update that will correct the issues we uncovered. However, some affected users may not realize the times on their site are in the wrong time zone and when our code begins converting their UTC offset to a more correct timezone, it will appear to them (and to their website visitors) that those times have changed. For example, instead of having an event start at 9am Pacific Time, it may appear to begin at 8am Mountain Time. There’s no way for us to accurately predict what specific UTC offsets will be affected because of the variations in server environments so that means that some manual intervention will be needed to correct any discrepencies.
To that end, we will be releasing in the next release of Event Espresso a “Datetime Offset Fix” tool that will make it easy for you to add or subtract an offset to all your existing dates and times in the Event Espresso system at once. This tool will be found on the Maintenance page section of your website and is a simple form for adding the offset you want to be applied to all dates and times found in Event Espresso. Once you provide the offset and click submit it will automatically go through your database and apply the given offset to all your Event Espresso datetime fields.
Our support team will also be on hand to assist any of you with any issues you may encounter when this change is rolled out.
We strongly recommend that if you are using a UTC offset as the timezone setting for your website you change your site to use a city or region instead. We recommend doing that in the next release of Event Espresso which will include the Datetime Offset Fix tool so if needed after the change, you can use the utility tool to correct any issues you see with the time displayed. How would it work?