Why is Event Manager unable to handle Summer/Winter time switch?

Hi David,

This is likely down to how WordPress / your server is dealing with timezones. First thing to check is if Timezone under Settings > General is set to a number like UTC+1 or set to a location like Paris.

The other thing to check is what time your server is currently set to. If you’re in France but your server is in the USA, for example, the server may still be running on USA daylight time (which doesn’t finish until next weekend).

Hi caimin_nwl,

Thanks a lot for your feedback. First check: my Timezone settings are correct (UTC+1) and WordPress backend displays the correct time.

My web server is located in the UTC+1 zone (I looked at raw logs) and switched to French Winter Time last Sunday at 03:00, as expected.

IMHO, the problem runs deeper: when we are under Summer Time, all future (under Winter Time) events are displayed as 1h too early, and after we switch to Winter Time, all past (under Summer Time) events are displayed as 1h too late!

Caveat: what’s really puzzling is that this bug occurs only in RSS and iCal feeds! The web pages display the correct times. My guess: there is some encoding trick in the RSS/iCal formats that the plugin is not taking correctly into account.

You can easily check this on my RSS feed, as explained in my previous post. And apparently, I am not the only one to experience this.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,

David.

If I remember correctly there was a similar bug about this time last year but it was fixed with an update to the RSS template (again, if I remember correctly…).

Are you using a custom RSS template or plugin?

Thanks caimin_nwl for the feedback.

Unfortunately, I use no custom RSS template, and no RSS plugin. (Regarding plugins, could Jetpack, the official Automattic plugin, considered as an RSS plugin? I don’t think so.)

Here are two very interesting additional observations that points to a feed format issue, in my humble opinion… A recent event scheduled on the previously mentioned website on November 3rd at 17:30CET is displayed as:

• 16:30CET on Apple Calendar 8.0 (2026)
• 17:30CET on Thunderbird 31.2.0 with Lightning 3.3.1 (under MS Win 8.0)

Therefore, the bug is RSS-reader implementation-dependent, and there is a high probability this is caused by some format issue. What do you think?

I’ve found that WordPress handles Daylight savings time properly if I choose a city in my state and time zone (Los Angeles), But if I use the UTC I have to switch between UTC7 and UTC8 when the time changes. Don’t know if it is set up well for Europe but it works in the US.

It makes sense that specifying the city would work better – I could be in one of several countries with different time policies in UTC-8, but the time policy is for LA is a known entity.

Thanks a lot webmystery for this hint! I did not notice at first that it is also possible to specify cities in WordPress time settings. And it does solve the issue perfectly indeed! Both my RSS and iCal feeds are providing the right answer now, both under Apple Calendar and Thunderbird!

Here are my two cents for a small improvement in the WordPress backend UI:

• By default, WordPress is installed with UTC settings, and cities are located above the UTC settings in the drop-down list. Therefore, they are invisible at first glance.
• By shipping WordPress without default time settings and/or by providing two alternatives for time setting, with two drop-down lists (one for cities, one for UTCs) this would make this issue more explicit and avoid a lot of confusion IMHO.

Thanks again webmystery for your precious help!