iCal Timezone Confusion

[Andrew Wolfe]

Hi,

Just launched new website using TEC which is pretty exciting.

I’m noticing that ICS files generated aren’t in the right timezone for me. For example, one event set to start at 5pm shows as 1pm. Our events are Eastern US and WordPress settings are set to New York. Looking at the ICS file itself, it doesn’t appear to include anything related to timezone but I may be incorrect or that’s just intended behavior.

Here’s a link to the mentioned event: http://firstbaptistcleveland.com/event/engage/
And a link to a cached ICS: http://firstbaptistcleveland.com/ical/latest.ics

Diving into timezone issues is confusing as anything but oh well.

[Barry]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for getting in touch – sorry to hear the iCal functionality isn’t working for you.

The date/time information in the iCal feeds is in UTC and it does seem that they are off-track here. You noted your WordPress settings have the local timezone as New York, also. Can you confirm how that has been set?

For example, is it a UTC offset like UTC-4 or the geographic name “America/New York”?

I’m also wondering if you could share your system information and confirm if you have or would be able to run through our conflict testing steps.

[Andrew Wolfe]

This reply is private.

[Andrew Wolfe]

Using America New York now but (if relevant to know) I did have it set to UTC-4 or UTC-5 originally and it was an hour later than correct time vs what it shows now.

I switched to New York instead after reading another thread about timezone issues.

[Barry]

One of the things that jumps out at me from your system information (thanks for sharing!) is the presence of Series Engine.

We’ve hit up against conflicts with this in the past, owing to the fact that it alters the system timezone setting during runtime. This can impact events in different ways – sometimes it may distort the information that is presented on the frontend/through ical feeds and similar, sometimes it actually means the date/time information is stored incorrectly in the database.

Would you be able to (temporarily) deactivate that plugin specifically, regenerate one of the impacted events and see if the issue is corrected at that point?

[Andrew Wolfe]

Disabled Series Engine and tried again. This is a test event created after disabling series engine. I set the time to 8pm – 9pm.

And it does appear to be working now..

Hmm, Series Engine is pretty important for us. How do you recommend we proceed?

EDIT: If you want to see a version of the ICS after disabling Series Engine, use this link: http://firstbaptistcleveland.com/ical/tec.ics

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20150801T000000Z
DTEND:20150801T010000Z
DTSTAMP:20150731T203746Z
CREATED:20150731T203738Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20150731T203738Z
UID:[email protected]
SUMMARY:Test Event
DESCRIPTION:
URL:http://firstbaptistcleveland.com/event/test-event/
LOCATION:TN
END:VEVENT

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by Andrew Wolfe. Reason: Added link to example ICS file

[Barry]

I can appreciate it’s important for you, but I also feel that they shouldn’t be modifying the default timezone in this way (WordPress itself explicitly sets it to UTC to provide a uniform baseline, and their code is changing this).

Are you able to reach out to them for this one and confirm if:

• Their code still contains a date_default_timezone_set() call (which is what I remember and suspect is still in place, but it doesn’t harm to confirm)
• If they can provide some code that stops it from doing this
• If perhaps they could even explain why this is necessary it might give us some ideas for countering it

[Andrew Wolfe]

Sure, I certainly understand. I’ve passed along this info to them and asked for some clarification. Hopefully they can provide some and provide a solution or idea. I will bring anything I find back here as soon as I have something so maybe it’ll be helpful to others.

[Barry]

Fantastic, thank you Andrew.

[Andrew Wolfe]

Eric Murrell with Series Engine has provided a super simple fix for this. Enabling Time.ly Plugin Compatibility in Series Engine settings seems to do the trick.

Thanks for the help, Barry. Not sure I would have discovered this otherwise.

[Barry]

That’s awesome – thanks to Eric Murrell, in that case, and also to yourself for reporting back with the fix: from experience, there seems to be a lot of users who also have Series Engine installed and I’m sure this will help them, too 🙂

I’ll go ahead and close out this topic – of course, should anything else crop up, please just create a new support topic and one of the team will be only too happy to assist 🙂

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