Event RSS Feed Shows Incorrect Time Zone Info

[Vi Wickam]

I’m wanting to do a monthly RSS Feed driven email of my events.

When I look at the Feed, it looks like it’s presenting the time as if it’s in UTC, but it’s using the local time zone data for the time.

http://www.vithefiddler.com/calendar/feed/

On the next upcoming event, you can see this field:
<pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2016 19:00:00 +0000</pubDate>

The date and time are actually in Mountain Time, but it’s displayed as +0000, which denotes that it’s UTC.

This is clearly a bug, but I don’t see where to do a bug report. I hope this makes it to the right people.

Thanks,
Vi

[Brook]

Howdy Vi,

Thanks for reaching out about a suspected bug! That behavior you have described is definitely not how our calendar is intended to operate, and not how it works on other installs. There must be something unique about your install causing the times to shift. While it is expected behavior for it to convert times to UTC,the times should be automatically adjusted with it.

If you need help figuring out what’s going would you mind logging in first so I can verify your support access? Or, if you do not have a license to any of our premium plugins (which includes a year of support access to these forums) then do not forget about the free support you can get on WordPress.org: The Events Calendar . We even check those forums once each week and provide as much support as we can for free.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Kyle]

I can confirm this bug still exists. The pubdate in the RSS feed does not take the timezone set on the specific event into account. It seems to default to whatever the general WordPress timezone settings are set to.

This is a bug with The Events Calendar.

[Brook]

Howdy Kyle,

Thanks for reaching out as well. I would love to help you figure this out! It likely stems from a conflicting plugin or theme. Due to how PHP works there is a shared timezone for all plugins on the server, and thus if one plugin or even a theme changes it it can cause misbehaviors for every other piece of code on your site. If this is the case it’s not a bug that can be fixed by our plugin, but identifying the source of the conflict can yield possible workarounds.

Would you mind opening up a topic in our Premium Forums here so I can help you identify the cause? This forum is only for sales questions, we can’t help with troubleshooting here. Or, if you do not have a license to any of our premium plugins then don’t forget about WordPress.org: The Events Calendar where you can get volunteer support for free!

Cheers!

– Brook

[Vi Wickam]

Hi Brook,

I have tested this behavior with no other plugins enabled, and only the wordpress default theme and the Events Calendar. This is most definitely a bug.

[Brook]

I am happy you gave that a whirl.

Again I want to mention that it is expected the timezone will be +0000, the international default time zone. But, the times of the events should be shifted to match. If you have an event that is at noon and your event is UTC-7, then it will show as 7pm +0000 in your feed. This is expected behavior. What is not is expected is for it to show as noon +0000.

You can look through our showcase to see countless websites that behave as expected, per the above. For example this feed shows this event as taking place on Thu, 05 Jan 2017 03:30:00 +0000, which is the proper time considering the server is set to pacific time.

I have now tested this on numerous sites and found them all behaving properly. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a proper bug, but it does make it a lot less likely that the cause is our plugin and more likely that it is the result of your server or configuration. More importantly it means that in order diagnose the cause of this on your site we will have to do some in depth technical support.

You asked at the outset where to report bugs. I really appreciate you taking the time to report and test this. In cases like this where in depth support is required to determine if there is a bug in our plugin or in the server config, the support forums are the best venue to continue the discussion. There is of course the premium forum here accessible to licensed users, or the free support forums manned by volunteers. One of these two is going to be the ideal spot to help you find a fix for this problem. And if the problem ends up being a bug in our product, they will file a bug report from there.

Does that all make sense?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Vi Wickam]

That makes sense, Brook. I can see that it’s functioning correctly on your demo site. I’m fairly certain that it worked correctly on my site in the past, because I’ve been using a monthly RSS driven events email for the last year, and last month (December 1) was the first time I noticed that the times on all of the events showed up incorrectly in the email.

It’s definitely still translating the time offset incorrectly in my feed. I have reported this to the wordpress support forum as well, but so far haven’t gotten it resolved.

It definitely could be something specific to how the Events Calendar is configured in my install. I don’t see how it could be server config when only the events calendar feed has the glitch though.

Thanks,
Vi

[Brook]

Thank you Vi! I really appreciate your understanding.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Author]

Posts