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Event Calendar Invite Time Zone Issues

Posted: October 1, 2020 at 11:49 am


Stewart goodwin

October 1, 2020 at 11:49 am

We hold Virtual Events for people in all 4 time zones of the continental US and our office is based in Mountain Time Zone. Even though the events are virtual, we customize the events based on which city/region they live in.

When someone in a time zone outside of Mountain Time downloads the .ics Calendar invite file, it shows the event at the wrong time because our site is set to Mountain Time. In other words, the calendar item thinks that all times are in Mountain Time, but we post times for events in the Local Time Zone.

Here’s an example — we have an event for people in Atlanta, GA which starts at 8:30am Eastern. If someone in Atlanta signs up for this event and downloads the calendar item from our site, the calendar item shows 10:30am their time because it’s auto-adjusting from Mountain Time.

Example of where they download the calendar item from our site:
example of calendar download on our site

What’s the easiest way to fix this issue?


Tony

  • Support Staff

October 5, 2020 at 4:36 am

Hi there,

Currently, there isn’t an easy fix for this as EE only supports a single timezone.

All datetimes within EE are stored as a date string in UTC+0 so to do what you are looking for you’ll need to store the correct offset to use within the event itself (a custom field for example) and then filter the iCal data to apply the correct offset.

We have a filter for the iCal data which is FHEE__EED_Ical__download_ics_file_ics_data

Here is a simple example of doing this here:

https://gist.github.com/joshfeck/66381e3defa0cd8e7d415edb4348be49

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