US Time Zones

The timezone cities are an artifact of how PHP knows about timezones.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

WP has to match what PHP is expecting.

Really? Do you not have the ability to create x number of most used settings to display at the top of the list. In the drop box we all see eastern, central, etc…. In the value of the drop box have the right value for php. Not hard!

The reason you want to select a city is because of Daylight Savings Time.

Every region has its own rules about when DST starts and ends. Selecting just things like “Eastern” and so on will put you in the right time zone, sure, but selecting the city will let the system also know what dates to adjust the time to and from Daylight Savings, so it will adjust automatically for you.

Every city in the list represents some timezone and the daylight savings rules for that particular jurisdiction. Some of those rules have changed over time, what with various legislation and the like, and each time this happens, a new entry is made to cover those changes.

But instead of having “Los Angeles” it would be easier to find as “Pacific – Los Angeles” because I have NO CLUE what CA city I need to be looking for. And if there is only 1 city in Pacific then you only need to list Pacific.

And you do or should have control over the text you display to us vs the text that is needed for php.

Then some people would complain that it says, “Pacific – Los Angeles”, and then, “but I live in San Diego!”.

Let’s just take what we have for now and make it work… unless you wish to fix that via a plugin.

Me? I have better things to attend to right now.

The list is standardized. We don’t create it or maintain it ourselves, nor is it even contained within WordPress. It comes from PHP.

You can find more information about the timezone database here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database