UTC vs GMT

[Ryan Clover-Owens]

Is it possible to have the date picker show timezones in GMT values?

UTC is confusing for many of our users.

Thanks,
Ryan

[Cliff]

Hi, Ryan. Our timezone picker comes from WordPress itself:

• https://github.com/moderntribe/the-events-calendar/blob/4.6.11.1/src/functions/template-tags/date.php#L134
• https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_timezone_choice/

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions on this topic.

[Ryan Clover-Owens]

Are you saying I can add this code to my functions file to make the change?

[Cliff]

I’d caution you against using any manual offset timezone, whether UTC or GMT. It’s always best to use city-based timezones because of Daylight Savings Time (DST), even if your events are in an area that doesn’t observe DST.

We have this soon-to-be-released plugin that only allows city-based timezones and “UTC” itself: https://cl.ly/2H021c2Z301W (it works in the wp-admin event edit screen and on the Community Events form)

I personally recommend only city-based timezones to all our users because of all the oddities, edge cases, and bugs I’ve seen as a result of timezones and DST.

If you really want to rename “UTC” to “GMT”, I’d actually recommend using translations instead of the tribe_events_timezone_choice filter I linked you to previously.

You can customize/change any bit of text with the Say what? plugin (third-party, not guaranteed or supported by us). For example, you could try translating “UTC” to “GMT” so that “UTC+1” would look like “GMT+1” to the user but actually be stored as “UTC+1” for the database and functions to work off of.

Please let me know which direction you go and any follow-up thoughts you might have.

[Cliff]

Ryan, just letting you know we formally-released this as a free extension at https://theeventscalendar.com/extensions/allow-only-location-time-zones-for-events/

The code is significantly more simplified than the .zip I previously linked you to. Please delete that other one and use this new “official” version instead.

Please let me know how this goes for you.

[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

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