Timezone/DST issues

Hello, thanks for writing and apologies for my delayed response!

A new version of the plugin is now available which should resolve these time zone issues. Please update and let me know if you’re still having any problems.

Not resolved. See https://www.pack862.org/calendar/. The events are 5 hours off.

I’m sorry to hear this problem is persisting for you. The new version (currently 1.1.3) uses an updated version of the third-party ICS Parser library, which was substantially refactored, and I needed to make a number of changes to my plugin as a result. But I am using the $event->dtstart_tz and $event->dtend_tz values for the start/end times now, as the OP suggested.

Just to make sure we’re covering all of the bases, can you go to Settings > General > Timezone and verify that you’ve got your local time zone set correctly? I did run into some issues with time zone inconsistencies with Google Calendar specifically during development on the new version, but I was able to get those resolved on my end. It looks like you’re in Central Time (so am I), so the fact that it’s 5 hours off leads me to believe that your site might be set to GMT.

(Side note: I see it’s showing all of the days in your calendar grid with the day of the week as well as the day of the month, which I am guessing is probably not how you want it, since there are already DOW headers on the calendar. Looks like that’s a CSS error on my part; it’s only supposed to be showing the day of week on the phone layout, but I’m relying on a CSS class that was in the theme on my test site. I will add that to the plugin and roll out an update shortly.)

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by room34.

Thank you. I did check the time zone earlier, and it is correct.

Thanks. Would you mind also going into Google Calendar and making sure its time zone is set correctly?

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r

Click the gear icon (Settings menu) in the top bar, click on Settings, and then the second box on that page is Time Zone. Make sure the Primary Time Zone is set to (GMT-05:00) Central Time - Chicago.

Please let me know what you find, and if all looks good, I’ll do some additional troubleshooting in the plugin. Thanks!

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by room34.

Thank you. It’s not from Google Calendar. It’s from a web app we use to manage our Cub Scout pack.

This is the timezone block from the ICS, which is correct for our location:

BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Chicago
TZURL:https://tzurl.org/zoneinfo/America/Chicago
X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Chicago

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Aren Cambre.

Hi, your latest release fixed the CSS issue. Unfortunately, the time zone is still UTC, so all events are five hours off.

Hmm… looks like your time zone is correct. Can you send me the direct URL to your ICS file? If you’d prefer not to post it here, you can send it in the contact form on my website. https://room34.com/contact

Thanks!

Thank you! Just sent it to you via the contact form.

I appreciate your responsiveness. Your plugin is important to my Cub Scout pack during recruiting season.

Hi Aren,

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve just rolled out version 1.2.0 of the plugin, which I think should solve this issue for you, along with some others that have come to my attention.

In the case of the time zone, it looks like what was happening was the ICS Parser library was double applying its time zone offset in cases where individual events had time zone data, so the shift from GMT to the local time zone would get doubled on those events — e.g. in Central Time, events were showing 5 hours too early; in Easter Time they were showing 4 hours too early.

Please download version 1.2.0 when it becomes available today and let me know if it resolves the issue for you. Thanks!

Thank you. The bad times are resolved, although the calendar switched to weeks starting on Monday instead of Sunday. I do not see a way for me to change that behavior.

Thanks for the update. The day of week is based on the “Week Starts On” option in the WordPress Settings. It defaults to Monday, but if you change that to Sunday, your calendar should update accordingly.

Thank you. That fixed it.

Great! I’m going to mark this as resolved. Please let me know if you run into any other issues.