External Feed Block Incorrect Timestamp

[Bernard Neary]

Version: 15.04rc1

On a new page add an External feed. Timestamp displayed on Mahara does not match timestamp displayed on RSS feed page.
Seems to be incorrect by 13 hours - I can't find a user timezone setting ; I'm in GMT.

Examples:
Timestamp for item 1 should be 27 March 2015 00:03. Mahara displays 27 March 2015, 1:03 PM
Timestamp for item 2 should be 26 March 2015 23:59. Mahara displays 27 March 2015, 12:59 PM

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

Hi Bernard,

The external feed extracts the date from the feed using getDate() in htdocs/lib/pear/XML/Feed/Parser/Type.php
in Mahara, and that in turn uses the strtotime() function in PHP.

Part of the documentation for that function says: "Each parameter of this function uses the default time zone unless a time zone is specified in that parameter."

So the things we'll need to know to test this is
1) The URL of the feed used
2) What timezone is your PHP/Database operating in?

Cheers

Robert

[Bernard Neary (bneary)]

Hi,

The feed is:
http://www.rte.ie/rss/news.xml

The server URL is:
http://master.dev.mahara.org

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Bernard,

The master.dev.mahara.org site is set to New Zealand time. So what you're seeing is that the server is translating the times from your RSS file to NZDT, which is GMT+13.

Mahara does not currently have a feature to support user time zones. There's a (longstanding) wishlist bug for that, but as our major clients are primarily in one time zone each, we've never been able to organize funding to develop this feature.

Cheers,
Aaron