This year British Columbia has adopted a permanent Daylight savings time of PDT-UTC-7, meaning this Fall, we will not be going back an hour.
Our IT department sent an email out to our organization stating that our Apple and Microsoft are actively working on a solution but expect the possibility that the times may be off by 1 hour depending on the device or application used.
This got me thinking about LiveWhale events, and was wondering if I need to worry about this as well, or should our events continue to work?
Thanks for sharing this. It looks like we do have the ability to add a new supported timezone to LiveWhale, so we’ll roll that into our next upgrade.
If there’s a delay in releasing it and/or you aren’t running the latest LiveWhale version by the time the November 1 switchover happens, you could temporarily update your livewhale/core/config.php from 'TIMEZONE'=>'America/Los_Angeles', to 'TIMEZONE'=>'America/Phoenix', (Phoenix is part of the existing supported timezone list and is UTC-7 year round, same as British Columbia’s new permanent time.)
There may be some weirdness with historical data upon flipping the global site timezone—we’ll queue it up to check out in the meantime.
We’ve added America/Vancouver as a supported timezone and, in our tests, this covers the permanent Daylight Savings time seamlessly. You can test it out on your install by setting America/Vancouver as the timezone for a single group, otherwise to change it sidewide you’d go in via SFTP and edit livewhale/core/config.php to change the 'TIMEZONE'=>'...', line to 'TIMEZONE'=>'America/Vancouver',
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! If anyone has trouble with this or wants assistance patching in the updated timezone, feel free to reach out via the Help Request Form.
Would it be possible to create a similar timezone for Alberta? We are on Mountain time but all events after Nov. 1 are displaying CST at the moment. I assume this is related to remaining on daylight savings time here.
Hi Leslie – sure thing, I think you’re already covered because we have existing support for America/Edmonton as a timezone, and I’m seeing evidence online that the PHP timezone database has already included logic for that DST permanent change.
Probably when your site was first setup, we used another US city that was also in Mountain Time (since it didn’t seem to make a difference), but now as localities are starting to diverge in how they handle permanent DST, getting more specific is a good idea – if you give it a try editing /livewhale/core/config.php and setting 'TIMEZONE'=>'America/Edmonton', I believe that should do the trick. If you run into issues here feel free to drop us a note in the Request Help Form.
I have confirmed that our config file has ‘TIMEZONE’=>‘America/Edmonton’ so this is a different issue. I’ll start a new thread as I think the original request has been resolved.