Posted by Ben Bradley on 10/10/07 11:03

Hi everyone

We're in the process of setting up an intranet solution using Apache,
PHP and MySQL.
Currently it's all running on windows server 2000 but once we're closer
to completion we will move all this over to Linux.

My question relates to what the best way is to handle dates/times with
regards to daylight savings time.
And we've managed to get ourselves confused over it all in the process.

At the moment we've been storing all dates/times as Unix timestamps in
our MySQL database, as a standard integer field. Which we noticed was
the same way phpBB does it, so it can't be a bad idea.

At the moment all our users are in our UK office

But when we convert those values to readable dates, we usually use the
PHP date command:
date('j M y H:i', $timestamp);


At the moment running that using the current time does return the
correct values.

Here's my questions:
1) When we're in BST (British Summer Time) which is 1hr ahead of GMT,
does that function provide an automatic correction?

2) The Default timezone setting in our php.ini file (as discovered from
phpinfo) is currently Europe/London
Do I need to change any timezone of Apache or MySQL on our server from
BST to GMT when the clocks change, in order to make sure we're storing
accurate timestamps with our data?

3) Our Windows 2000 Server is set to GMT timezone, and the box is
checked for Automatically adjust clock for daylight saving changes
Also we have it synchronising time using NTP with our local IPCop
firewall box, which itself syncs from 0.uk.pool.ntp.org and uk.pool.ntp.org
Is there anything we need to be doing on the server when the clocks
change, to ensure we're getting correct values?


We were trying to think through all this earlier today, and just got
ourselves totally confused in the end.
So I'd appreciate it if someone can give us some advice and help us work
through our confusion.


Thanks
Ben

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