ChangeTimeFormat

Summary: Change the format or timezone of dates and times

Status: Stable

Prerequisites:

Maintainer: Petko (Original author Pm)

Discussion: ChangeTimeFormat-Talk

Categories: Layout

Votes:

Questions answered by this recipe

How do I change the time format?
How can I display dates and times in a different timezone?

Changing PmWiki's time output format

PmWiki uses the $TimeFmt variable and PHP's strftime function to format its dates and times. The default setting of $TimeFmt is "%B %d, %Y, at %I:%M %p", which displays the name of the month (d), year (I), minutes (p). The documentation for strftime describes the various %-parameters that are available.

Thus, to change the display of dates and times to a "mm-dd-yyyy hh:mm" format, set $TimeFmt in local/config.php as

    $TimeFmt='%m-%d-%Y %H:%M';     # mm-dd-yy hh:mm
    $TimeFmt="%d.%m.%G, at %R %Z"; # german (ISO year) format
    $TimeFmt='%F %R';              # yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm - International Standard ISO 8601
    $TimeFmt='%Y %b %a %e %R';     # logical-scale full: (example: 2007 Jan Fri 26 00:29)

Setting the time zone on PHP 5.1 or newer

The timezone setting allows for all time stamps in RecentChanges, in the page histories and in the author signatures to be in a specific timezone. If your hosting provider is located in your timezone, it may already be correctly configured without you needing to do anything. If it is not, here is how to change it.

Set to config.php something like:

    date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');

There is a list of defined timezone identifiers, you can find yours starting from this page: List of Supported Timezones.

Setting the time zone on PHP 5.0 or older

To change your timezone, you generally need to know the value of the "TZ" or "timezone" environment variable. These are defined for different localities around the world. For example, in the U.S. the Eastern time zone setting is generally "EST5EDT", which gives the name of the timezone ("EST"), the number of hours offset from GMT (5), and a string to be used if the zone honors daylight savings time ("EDT").

Thus, to change PmWiki's timezone to be U.S. Eastern Time, add the following line to local/config.php.

    putenv("TZ=EST5EDT");

Some common timezone values (feel free to add to this list):

    EST5EDT            U.S. Eastern Standard/Daylight Time
    CST6CDT            U.S. Central Standard/Daylight Time
    MST7MDT            U.S. Mountain Standard/Daylight Time
    MST7               U.S. Mountain Standard Time (Arizona)
    PST8PDT            U.S. Pacific Standard/Daylight Time
    AKST9AKDT          U.S. Alaska Standard/Daylight Time

    UTC0               Universal Coordinated Time
    GMT0               Greenwich Mean Time
    CET-1CEST          Central Europe Time/Central Europe Summer Time
    CET1CEST           Actual Central Europe Time (Amsterdam/Frankfurt/Oslo/Paris/Rome/Madrid/Geneva)
    NZS-12NZD          New Zealand Standard/Daylight Time
    AEST / AEDT        Australian Eastern Standard Time (UTC +10) / Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC +11)
    WAUST-8WAUDT       Western Australia Standard/Daylight Time
    America/Sao_Paulo  Brazil Standard time (don't forget the underscore)
    JST                Japan Standard Time
    MSK                Moscow/Saint-Petersburg
    IST                Indian Standard Time
    SAST               South Africa Standard Time (UTC + 2 hours)
    EST-5              Jamaica Standard Time (UTC -5)

Contributor

Reinhard Hofmann
Pm

Comments

See discussion at ChangeTimeFormat-Talk