Feature request: Daylight Savings Time auto-detection

  • I’m honestly surprised you don’t have this built into your plugin. Now that we’re officially ON in Daylight Savings Time, I’m having to scramble to adjust your plugin’s timezones on 60+ websites. It would be awesome (especially in the FREE version) if you were to implement auto detection of whether a site should be in DST or not. Toggle could be:

    detectdst=’on’ (options are on/off, default to on)

    I updated one of my own plugins yesterday to do just that. This is the code I used for this. As you can see, it also utilizes the tz function, so you could incorporate it pretty easily into your pluginasdf

    /***
    * Making the plugin support timezones and DST much better and automatically, if desired.
    */
    function getLDotWTime($tz = 'America/New_York', $DST = 'on') {
    $date = new DateTime('now', new DateTimeZone($tz));
    if ($DST == 'on' && $date->format('I') == 1) {
    $date->modify('+1 hour');
    }
    return $date->format('Y-m-d');
    }

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
  • Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    ICS Calendar does support Daylight Saving Time. It was a huge focus of attention in the early development of the plugin. But it depends on the site having its timezone set correctly. It must be set to a Region/City pair, not UTC or a UTC offset.

    https://icscalendar.com/general-wordpress-settings/

    https://icscalendar.com/faqs-and-tips/#timezones-my-events-are-showing-the-wrong-times-what-do-i-do

    You can also set the timezone for individual calendars using the tz parameter.

    https://icscalendar.com/icsdocs/#tz

    It does not handle it automatically. And, for the record, as an experienced (senior level) WordPress developer who has set up over 600 WordPress sites in the last 10 years, one of the FIRST things I do is set the timezone correctly within Settings.

    In this site’s particular case, I was using America/New_York in the “tz” field and had to change that to America/Chicago in order to show the proper times. That is *not* automatically.

    [ics_calendar url=”[URL REMOVED]” title=”[TITLE REMOVED]” description=”false” eventdesc=”true” view=”month” limitdays=”150″ tz=”America/Chicago”]

    That’s the shortcode for this site.

    Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    Have you checked that the source feed contains the correct timezone data? I’m not doubting your experience. But there are thousands of sites using the plugin, and I haven’t received any DST-related support requests in at least 5 years. There must be something specific to your configuration that is causing the issue. If you’re not able to track it down, please submit a support request including the feed URL and your system report and I can help you troubleshoot further.

    Yes, I have. And this is consistent across MULTIPLE websites I currently manage for my day job (100 WordPress sites, ICS is installed on 29 of them.

    If this were one or two sites, I could see this being isolated to those individual sites, but 20+ are all showing the same exact issue. I promise, it’s not a PEBCAK error (at least not on my end).

    Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    Thanks… I’ll need to get the feed URL(s) and system report for one of those sites to troubleshoot this further. Please use the support request form. Thanks.

    Since I’m trying to send you two separate reports (I have all details in separate text files) and cannot upload text files, is there another way to send you this info?

    Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    Sorry about that. I just went in and changed the form to accept text files in the upload box.

    “System Report for DOMAINNAME.tld.txt – This type of file is not allowed. Must be one of the following: png,jpg,jpeg”

    Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    Forgot to clear the cache… try again.

    On their way. ??

    Plugin Author room34

    (@room34)

    Just wrapping this up for anyone else who comes across this thread… @bearlydoug and I continued to work on the issue over email. Ultimately our tests were inconclusive, but I think this may have been an environment-specific issue. That said, I’m well aware that different calendar sources handle timezone/DST rules differently, and it’s possible there are still some lingering issues around it within the plugin.

    If you (anyone reading this) are finding that event times around DST are “off” by an hour, please use the support request form to send me your exact shortcode (I need the feed URL) and system report, and I’ll work with you to troubleshoot.

    I gotta tip my hat in a sign of MAJOR respect to @room34. Absolutely awesome to work with. And definitely super knowledgeable.

    Thank you, S!

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)
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