Imported Events in Outlook are +1

[Stephen Gasser]

When I export an event (http://cityhutchinson.staging.wpengine.com/event/city-council-meeting/2016-05-24/) into Outlook the time is getting switched from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM. The timezone set in WordPress is America/Chicago which is our correct timezone. If I switch the WordPress timezone to UTC -5 the event imports just fine into Outlook but I’d like to avoid using that solution as the times will start to be off after Nov 6, 2016 when DST ends.

[Brook]

Howdy vividimage,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I do not have Outlook and so far no one that is currently online does either. However we would very much like to test this in Outlook and see if we can reproduce and maybe find a fix or get a bug ticket started.

I am just responding here to let you know this is now on our radar, and as soon as someone with Outlook comes online they can pursue this with you further.

It’s nice seeing you around again! I just wish it wasn’t because of a possible bug. 🙂

• Brook

[Andras]

Hello vividimage,

Brook brought your issue to my attention. Let me try to help you with this one.

Time zones and their conversion is quite tricky, and unfortunately it’s a bit difficult to test the DST effect. However, I did some deeper testing of events, WordPress and how Outlook handles all this. Here is what I discovered.

As you most probably know UTC doesn’t ever change, it doesn’t take DST into consideration. It is fix all throughout the year for all time zones. For Chicago the offset is always UTC-06:00. And this is going to help us here.

There are 2 places where you can set the timezone. One is for WordPress under Settings > General, which I believe you indicated above. Since you want your site to be running on the proper local time all the time, I recommend you to set this to Chicago. This automatically will do the DST switch when needed and it will not influence your event timings and iCal export whatsoever. This is only for setting the time of your site. This time is recorded for example as the publishing time of a post when it is published.

The second place where you can set the timezone is when you create an event. (Check this screenshot.) If you click on the timezone it will change to a dropdown and you can select a timezone of your liking. By default this is set to the timezone of your WordPress site. However, you should set this to your UTC timezone (so UTC-6) to have it export and import properly.

Though I couldn’t test this with DST changes, it should work, as Outlook does some fancy timezone calculations which should make it appear at the proper time in any timezone, no matter whether DST or not is on. (In case interested, here is an extensive article about how Outlook handles all this with meeting invitations sent across multiple timezones.)

Please check and I’m looking forward to hearing about your results!

Cheers,
Andras

 

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