I have a question regarding Date and Time for MYSQL. Basically I started building a comments section for a web project I have going on. I was building out the DB table and wanted to know how the DB stores the date and time.
For instance if I am in LA and the time is 7:00 PM will it store the comment at 7PM and say that I am from New York obviously and I see the comment its 10 PM so what time will I see the 7PM that wouldnt really make sense. I am wondering how you solve this problem and differentiate between different time-zones.
I am imagining that the server has its own time zone associated with it so all time is delineated from that which would make things a whole lot easier. But is it right that a person sees their time from a post as 10PM when it was made at 7PM. This is all very confusing to me. Any information on how to regularly deal with this issue or if I have one at all will be greatly appreciated. I am building my site using PHP and Codeigniter.
I personally just store the times in the database under an INT ( 11 ) and use the native PHP time() function to get the time, and then you can convert this into a nicer format of a date using some of the PHP functions http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php you can get the year, month, day, hour, minute, etc.
You then can easily just add or subtract the # of hours (3600 seconds in an hour) depending on the time zone. May be an easier way to do this, but this is how I am currently doing it 🙂