Question: I have gone through many timezone/PHP posts, and most suggest storing your datetime fields in UTC, then using the application users timezone offset when storing and displaying datetime information. 

The problem i have I've inherited an application that wasn't timezone aware, and now I need to cater for this.

The server is already set to `"EST +11:00 Australia/Melbourne"`, and there are already applications running from that server. So i can't change this.

Fortunately, I do know a users timezone offset, ie `-05:00`, etc,.

The application takes Javascript Dates and parses them using PHP's `strtotime()` function and stores in a MySQL database, like this:

```
$event_starts = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', 
    strtotime('Thu Dec 02 2010 11:15:00 GMT+1100 (AUS Eastern Daylight Time)');

```

So does anyone have any suggestions for the best way on how I can make this application timezone aware considering the server isn't set to UTC? 

Many thanks, J.

Answer: 
You could make use of

1) [date\_default\_timezone\_set](http://php.net/manual/en/function.date-default-timezone-set.php) - Sets the default timezone used by all date/time functions in a script 

2) Instead of using this function to set the default timezone in your script, you can also use the INI setting [date.timezone](http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.configuration.php#ini.date.timezone) to set the default timezone.
> 
> So does anyone have any suggestions for the best way on how I can make this application timezone aware considering the server isn't set to UTC? 
> 
> 
> 

If you manage to come with any scheme for remapping the timezones its going to be horribly complicated and even more impossible to ever fix properly. Do yourself a favour and get the server timezone to UTC and fix your existing data.