Issue with Timezones and All Day Events

[Marco]

Hello,

We’re importing from an iCal. That’s working fine. The problem is that everything comes in as UTC which confuses people.

There is an option to force a timezone which works except that events flagged as “all day events” end up spanning multiple days when the timezone is forced. I’m assuming this is because The Events Calendar doesn’t see the event as “all day” for the day listed but instead makes the start-time of midnight UTC into 7 PM eastern the night before?

Please help!

Thanks,
Marco

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Marco,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

There are a few places where a timezone can be set, which can affect your events.  You can set the WP timezone in Settings < General, so that is a good place to start.

You can also alter your timezone settings in Events Settings < General and scroll down to timezone settings.

Lastly, you can check out the timezone of the imported event by going to the Edit Event page and looking next to the Start/End date/time of the event:

Here is more information on working with timezones:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/working-with-timezones/

If you are still experiencing the issue after running through this information, please provide me with a URL that you are importing where the timezone is import incorrectly, so that I can run some tests on my end.

Let me know how it goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Marco]

This reply is private.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Marco,

Thank you for providing me with that information.  I tested the scenario on my site and I did see the same results as you.  However, I believe that this is expected behavior because the calendar is importing events in the UTC timezone.

With the timezone settings that you have, you can then go into the the individual All Day event that you want to change and edit the timezone on that single event.  I tested this scenario with the event you mentioned and it works.  If you change the timezone on that event to Eastern time, it will return to an all day event for December 11.

Let me know how it goes and if you have any other questions along the way!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Marco]

Hi Jaime,

Respectfully, I disagree: This is not working as intended and this is not a solution. The feed I gave you is one of many feeds — we have a very large number of events impacted over the next year and they are constantly being added. I can’t go in and manually adjust every single one, that’s why we purchased the event aggregator.

More to the point, “all day” events are not coming through in UTC. No timezone is mentioned.

This is the event from the feed:

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20171205T152937Z
UID:event_4850_20171211@[Removed]
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20171211
DESCRIPTION:[Removed]
SEQUENCE:20871549
SUMMARY:[Removed]
END:VEVENT

The DTSTART Value is only a date. Unlike other events that have a specific time and indicate they are UTC (DTSTART:20171207T130000Z for example, the Z after T string indicates UTC) this is only saying it is an all day event for 20171211 and does not indicate a time or timezone and that date should be honored as an all day event on the local timezone.

Regards,
Marco

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Marco,

I have done some more testing on my site and these are my settings that allow the all-day events to be imported properly:

WP Timezone: New York

Events Settings < Timezone Settings:

• Use the local timezones for each event

Event Update Authority:

• Overwrite my event with any changes from original source

Other import settings use global import settings.

You can obviously adjust according to your timezone.  Let me know how this goes for you!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Marco]

Jaime,

This is still importing the events as UTC. Is there another step I’m missing?

As in, events that are not all-day events have the time listed in UTC.

Regards,
Marco

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Marco,

If events are still being imported as UTC timezone, I would recommend that you take a look at the timezone settings that you have in ical as well.

How did the All Day events work out for you with the settings I provided?

Just so I know, as an example, what time should the following event actually start?

CA: Noon Dismissal (1pm-5pm on 12/22)

Let me know!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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