Display TZ wherever a date/time is shown within the UI.

Rich

I run multiple estates, that span globally and have servers in different timezones and some servers set to specifically different timezones. When reviewing the backups for example, I have no idea what 15:30 IS, that UTC/GMT or maybe it's the server time that's PT.

Can we either get more clarification on what the time displayed within the UI is, i.e. maybe browser TZ, or can this request be accepted as a future improvement please.

Thank you.

nsevimov

Sounds interesting as a feature and I've never seen it in any panel before.

Rich

@Adam Please can you tell me what is going on with timezones, as there is no information within the documentation.

Estate 1 is all in the USA, I login to the control panel server and look at the backups for a website, is that PT for the backup server time or CT for the control server time? Or GMT for my browser?

Estate 2 Control panel server is in Europe, set to UTC or CEST, backup server is in USA set to PT, I see a backup for a website either in the US or Europe website, what timezone is this?

Considering this system is going to be possible to scale globally and some business run servers across maybe a dozen timezones, I consider this CRITICAL information. If I can't tell WHEN a website was backed up, how can I know it is safe to perform it's updates? (I don't like doing updates unless the backup is fresh) Knowing the time right now with it's TZ I can do any needed calculations for converting TZ's.

How do clients know that the time they see in the control panel equates to their timezone or not. There's too much ambiguity.

Therefore this question needs answering please.

JohnB

Rich How do clients know that the time they see in the control panel equates to their timezone or not. There's too much ambiguity.

They assume because any decent product displays dates in local timezone. If you are displaying a date/time in another timezone thats when you specify the timezone. Its pretty standard.

Its really bad design to store server local time and then just serve that string to browsers. Its wrong on so many levels. That said some bad products do this I'm sure.

Enhance times/dates automatically use browser timezone. I have noticed this when testing on two virtual machines with different timezones.. I think it also formats based on locale as well.

I'd say it doesn't need the timezone, just the time/date relative to the user who is viewing.

This is how enhance does it.

twest

Why not just run a manual backup to get the time stamp, then compare to your server time in terminal. It's the most basic/easy thing you could do to answer most of your questions. I assume all time stamps use my server time.

Rich

twest I could easily figure this out but I believe this is something that can be improved upon for everyone. So I brought it here for a discussion.

XN-Matt

I'd say it doesn't need the timezone, just the time/date relative to the user who is viewing.

I.e set a timezone i.e "Europe/London - (currently BST (GMT+1))" for the user profile and the time/date they always see is relative to them.

Rich

JohnB Thank you John, I did think the best idea would be UTC, given all the server TZ's. Your explanation was apt.

@Adam Thank you for confirming this. Could I please ask this is written into the documentation so it's explicitly understood for all.

Adam

That's correct @JohnB , times are stored in UTC and displayed in the user's local time zone. We could potentially display that timezone, perhaps in a tooltip.

The only exception is the allowed backup hours, those are based on the control panel server's time zone.