In the old days, synchronizing php and javascript date and time functionality is a real pain. You need to detect the client timezone offset with javascript, and then convert it to a format which is php friendly, and transform it as a cookie, and so on. That’s a really hard process for a new programmer.
However, thanks to John Nylander, we can now have a rather convenient system. He made the JsTimezoneDetect javascript library.
Below is a quote form https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect/wiki/Home:
To simply store away a user’s timezone in a variable, you can simply import timezone_detect.js and do the following.
var timezone = determine_timezone().timezone;
// Now you have an instance of the TimeZone object.
alert(timezone.utc_offset);
// Offset in minutes from UTC
alert(timezone.olson_tz);
// Olson database timezone key (ex: Europe/Amsterdam)
alert(timezone.uses_dst);
// bool for whether the tz uses daylight saving time
This gives you an Olson database key you can use for datetime calculations in most programming languages.
After declaring the timezone variable in javascript, it’s time to transfer it into php. because the timezone.olson_tz is already in a php friendly format, we can then directly save it in a cookie with setCookie("timezone_js", timezone.olson_tz, 365).
When the data is stored in a cookie, the php script can start to take over. we can call the cookie by simply calling the $_COOKIE["timezone_js"] and putting it in date_default_timezone_set($_COOKIE["timezone_js"] ). That way, your web is now in the same timezone as the client.
That’s all from me, happy blogging!