[SOLVED] How to deal with the time zone difference

How to deal with the time zone difference

Using mysql, in a post table I use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP to store the date_time of publication.

Everything was ok when I was working on wampserver on local.

But I hosted my site yesterday on a server located in France, 2 hours away from the time zone of my country.

I'm using a timeago plug-in which processes the date and displays the elapsed time (there is .. sec ago, there is .. min ago, there is .. h ago, there is .. year ago) since the publication of a content.

After posting, I see "2 hours ago" when I just published 30 seconds ago.

How can I take into account the time zone of my users compared to the date and time of the server of my host?

Sample: If I post a content, 30 seconds later Me and the user who is at china or anywhere must see "30 seconds ago".

I tried that:

$d ="2020-02-28T13:09:33Z";
<time class='timeago' datetime='<?= $d ?>'> </time>

But instead of giving me "30 seconds ago", It gives me "2 hours ago".

Thank you.

Solution

I suspect you are calculating the relative time on the client side. For example, by timego plugin.

Neither MySQL, nor PHP know user's location and timezone. So, it's better to inform JS about server timezone and let it calculate the offset right.

Use ISO 8601 date time format to let timeago pligin know about server timezone. All the rest is up to JS plugin:

<?php

$ts = strtotime($row['date_time']);

?>

<time class="timeago" datetime="<?= date(DATE_ISO8601, $ts) ?>">

    <?= date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $ts) ?>

</time>


<script type="text/javascript">

    jQuery(function($) {

        $("time.DateTime").timeago();

    });

</script>