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While debugging a plugin I was writing, I noticed that on line 36 of wp-settings.php, the default timezone is hardcoded to UTC with a call to the date_default_set_timezone() function. This means any call to the PHP date/time functions will work with UTC as the local time.

Can someone please explain to me why this is a sane design choice by the Wordpress team? I understand if they want to store and manipulate times internally as UTC, but wouldn't a better alternative be to explicitly switch to a "UTC mode" when they need to do such logic?

Assuming you know to set your server's php.ini's timezone setting, this hardcoded UTC basically invalidates php.net's description of the date() function:

date — Format a local time/date

Which strikes me as a bad thing, no?

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2 Answers 2

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Somehow I missed the current_time function, which gives a good description of the situation and how to properly deal with the need to get the current blog-local time.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/current_time

Though the purist in me still hates how WP makes the time zone setting in php.ini obsolete without giving you a choice. *grumble grumble*

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    I have extensive theme and plugin code that uses date() and relies on a properly set PHP timezone, and only now I discover that the reason some WordPress dates look wrong is because it requires that I never touch the PHP default timezone. Yuck.
    – Nick Bedford
    Jun 20, 2018 at 5:57
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WordPress is not a simplistic script, it is a extensive web app. It includes own time zone settings and own functions for output of localized date/time info.

I suppose it is much more straightforward to set baseline time zone and operate on top of that, than trying to change it back and forth around all related functionality.

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    Oh I get that we're making some fundamental changes to the environment when WP runs, and all code should be viewed in the context of running within the Wordpress framework. I just don't think it's very intuitive to change a fundamental assumption about a set of oft-used PHP functions with a mandatory hardcoded statement.
    – Gregarious
    Oct 13, 2011 at 13:52

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