Php 5.3.0 & WP 2.8 (It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone)

I have run into the same issue and here is what I did to resolve it:

In /wp/wp-includes/functions.php

Add the following before the first function:

date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

Not sure if this is the best place to put this but some of the other places I tried it didn’t work or only worked for certain parts of WordPress

That seems to work, thought it’s quite ugly fix ??

Another way to approach this is to let php know what your time zone is. You can edit your php.ini file and put in the following line:

date.timezone = “America/Anchorage”

You can find valid time zone strings at https://nl3.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Any update on this? I tried Dan’s fix but without success – I have just reverted back to PHP 5.2.8

Dan LaSota posted the fix. This is a PHP change, not a WordPress change. PHP 5.3.0 needs the date.timezone ini entry setting properly in order to avoid the warning being sent out.

Prior to PHP 5.3.0, the line existed in the PHP ini but was generally commented out.

Depending on your setup you may need to restart your web services after making the change.

You should, of course, use the time zone you want, not necessarily “America/Anchorage”. Also I just installed apache/mysql/php3.0 on an entirely new machine, ran into the same problem and after adding the
date.timezone = "America/Anchorage"
to my php.ini file the problem went away.

If you don’t have access to the php.ini, adding this to the top of the wp-config.php file will do much the same thing:

date_default_timezone_set('America/Chicago');

Use whatever timezone is appropriate for you, of course. List is here:
https://us3.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Note that this will not affect the timezone setting in WordPress. In fact, WordPress will override it. It just doesn’t set it early enough to avoid this warning. The best way is still to have a default set in the php.ini file.

The best way is still to have a default set in the php.ini file.

Indeed, and if a web host has provided 5.3.0 then they should really have put the timezone setting into the php.ini, as the lack of it would affect all their users. I’d be tempted to open a ticket if that were the case.

Thank you – I’ll try it later.

Okay, my /etc/php.ini file looks like this
<—-snip

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
;
;
date.timezone = “Europe/London”
;
;date.default_latitude = 31.7667
;date.default_longitude = 35.2333

;date.sunrise_zenith = 90.583333
;date.sunset_zenith = 90.583333

snip—–>

I have restarted Apache – still get

Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘Europe/London’ for ‘BST/1.0/DST’ instead in /var/www/html/blog/wp-content/plugins/comment-timeout/comment-timeout.php on line 342

repeated with different line numbers.

Reverting back to 5.2.8!

peter-b: Make sure that there’s not another php.ini file somewhere. mod_php for Apache frequently has its own php.ini that’s not in /etc.

thanks for posting the solution with the php.ini! it solved my problem perfectly ??

conceptify thanks and your solution worked!

Another way to approach this is to let php know what your time zone is. You can edit your php.ini file and put in the following line:

date.timezone = “America/Anchorage”

You can find valid time zone strings at https://nl3.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Tried this and it fixed my problem. Thanks for solution.

I am running XAMPP on a USB stick and encountered the same problem as mentioned above. Here’s what I did to fix it:

First, I changed the “time zone” in my WordPress ‘Settings’ to ‘America/New York’.

Next, I went to my XAMPP control panel and selected the ‘Setup’ button. For reasons unknown to me, I eventually reached a screen that automatically changed the “php.ini” setting to reflect the WordPress setting change mentioned above.

Lastly, I shutdown both MySQL and Apache in my XAMPP control panel, restarted both and logged into my WordPress admin panel. Voila!!! everything is now fine.