Testing with an Artist Data Ical Feed that has no timezones specified in the file. A sample DTSTART and DTEND looks like this:
DTSTART:20091206T190000
DTEND:20091206T220000
These are what is called “floating” times. There is also no timezone specified anywhere in the file (although according to the spec, this should be ignored for floating times anyway.)
According to the ical spec
The recipient of an iCalendar object with a property value consisting of a local time, without any relative time zone information, SHOULD interpret the value as being
fixed to whatever time zone the ATTENDEE is in at any given moment. This means that two ATTENDEEs, in different time zones, receiving the same event definition as a floating time, may be participating in the event at different actual times. Floating time SHOULD only be used where that is the reasonable behavior.In most cases, a fixed time is desired. To properly communicate a
fixed time in a property value, either UTC time or local time with
time zone reference MUST be specified.
So, if this is really what the calendar owner wants, the plugin should use the wordpress or server timezone to display the dates – since impossible to know where the viewer might be. Right now it is not doing that – ever sinec wordoress started handling timezones, there have been glitches – seem sto go to the server timezone rather than the wordpress timezone. It was better with the automatic timezone plugin.
So looks like we need to look at
1) what is happening with wordpress timezones? why not working like the automatic timezone plugin did?,
2) maybe show the timezone icon with the timezone being used, even if there is no timezone in the ical file
3) allow maybe the tz= option in the ical spec, since I have now allowed the use of it as a query url – see http://icalevents.anmari.com/1634-artistdata-ical/?tz=America/Los_Angeles for example. This should be quick and easy fix for now.
Without the query url timezone, or any other specification, a calendar with only ‘local’ times will display on this website in this websites servers timezone.
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