Time zones
Asheesh Laroia
I'm in the late stages of deploying Calagator, and I realized that
for our application, time zones are going to be important. In particular,
people around the world are going to be adding events, and we're going
to be importing calendar data with different time zones.
In my experience, this is never perfect -- you're going to have to do
some cleanup. Luckily, Calagator's easy interface will makesthat easy.
Still, there are some core questions I have about time zones and y'all's
plans for the app. In particular:
* Are there plans to (or is it easy to) add time zone selection to the
date+time picker widgets you have?
* Are there plans to (or is it easy to) detect the user's time zone, and
show the front page in that time zone?
* Is the backend reasonably smart about time zones, taking them into
account when doing imports of remote calendar data?
Feel free to say just "read the code," but I was hoping to get more
of a holistic sense of it from you.
Thanks all!
-- Asheesh.
P.S. If you are wondering what the use is, you might want to see
http://openhatch.org/wiki/Calendar_events and
http://calendar-beta.openhatch.org/events/1 .
Asheesh Laroia
> Hi friendly Calagator folks,
>
> I'm in the late stages of deploying Calagator, and I realized that
> for our application, time zones are going to be important. In particular,
> people around the world are going to be adding events, and we're going
> to be importing calendar data with different time zones.
I did some research, and I wrote up this bug indicating the code changes
that I think would make sense:
https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue577
Here's my plan, from y'all's perspective:
Right now, the events calendar at http://events.openhatch.org/ lists all events
in UTC. That's because I set the theme time zone to UTC in this commit:
https://github.com/jcsims/calagator/commit/6d1e7a418808f080055bfcb49563caf510cc70ac
That, and the fact that the Calagator code configures its time zone when
it initializes the app. (I discovered that by looking for "time zone" in this
file, config/environment.rb )
What would be best would be if the code:
* accepted a time zone as a parameter in the query string, and also honored a
time zone sent to the server in a cookie
* if the time zone is set that way, the note in the
big yellow box at the top of the page should say that time zone
* To detect the user's time zone, we can use this JavaScript code:
https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect/wiki/Home
We would have to write some simple JS so that it sets a cookie (and also
enhance the Rails backend so it respects that cookie). Then, in the
yellow box, we can say what we think the current time is, so that the
user can visually confirm that we got it right.
Is this something that you folks (aka the calagator team) would be
interested in merging if we put it together? Other any obstacles you
think we will run into that we have not addressed above?
Looking forward to collaborating, and hoping for a response this time,
-- Asheesh.