Timezone settings for ical feed with 'Zulu' time set for events

[Chris]

hi there,

I just purchased a license for the aggregator plugin. The ical imports work great, events update as expected. That’s all fine.

However there is an issue with the timezone settings for some ical feeds. We have an ical feed (from a third party system which is not changeable) which sets the event timezone in Zulu time, which is GMT+0.

However the local timezone setting for the website is GMT +11 (Sydney). Imported events all show GMT +0 time, not the local time.

I have tried setting the event ‘timezone’ settings to import using the local timezone, as well as the site timezone. This makes no difference to the timezone for imported events, which is ALWAYS GMT+0

I have also tried both these settings with the local timezone set to GMT+0, GMT+11 and ‘SYDNEY’. None of the settings make any difference, the events all show up with the GMT+0 time zone.

For reference the time setting for an event in Zulu time shows up as:
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20161201T213000Z

The time setting for an event is 1st December 2016 at 9:30pm. It should be 2nd December 2016 at 8:30am.

Would another import setting workaround this? All imports were done as imports with either the ‘ical’ format or the ‘google calendar’ format.

[Hunter]

Hey Chris,

Thank you for your purchase and welcome to the PRO support forums. Before I test the issue myself, can you please review our Working with timezones Knowledgebase article? If you’re still having issues after that, please let me know and I’d be happy to further investigate. We also ask you confirm whether or not the issue occurs after reviewing our Testing for conflicts guide to rule out the possibility of a theme and/or plugin conflict.

Thanks again and I look forward to your response. Have a great evening!

[Sally Richardson]

Hi – I came across the same problem as Chris, which is what led me to make this feature request:

https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/17150957-time-zone-override-field-on-event-aggregator

At the time of import, there is a very helpful (in that it explained what was happening) message which says something like:
imported events which have a timezone will use that timezone, but if there is no timezone present then the timezone will be taken from the receiving calendar’s timezone.

Just wanted to give you both this background to save Chris doing lots more reading and testing….

[Chris]

hi Hunter

I have tested with multiple variations of the ‘timezone’ setting. For the record I tested the following combinations:
– WP Timezone: +11 GMT with “Use the sitewide timezone everywhere”
– WP Timezone: +11 GMT with “Use local timezones for each event”
– WP Timezone: ‘Sydney’ with “Use the sitewide timezone everywhere”
– WP Timezone: ‘Sydney’ with “Use local timezones for each event”
– WP Timezone: +0 GMT with “Use the sitewide timezone everywhere”
– WP Timezone: +0 GMT with “Use local timezones for each event”

None of these options seemed to change the date/time of the imported events to GMT+11, which is the timezone I need it to be.

I have also tested with all plugins disabled apart from the events calendar and the problem persists. The active theme is a child theme of ‘2013’, changing that made no difference to the imports above.

[Hunter]

Chris,

Thank you for the response. As user @tashminaartists pointed out, events imported through Event Aggregator which have a timezone will keep that timezone. Events without a timezone will be assigned to the sitewide timezone. We have a logged feature report aimed to address this shortfall you’ve pointed out, so I’ve added this forum thread to the ticket which helps expedite the process of it getting added into an upcoming release.

I know this is not ideal and thank you for your patience while we work to better improve how the plugin handles events with a different timezone than your WordPress site. Have a good afternoon and please let me know if you have any additional questions or concerns. Cheers!

[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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