Currently the extension sets the timezone to the globally set timezone of the site.
Events can be held in different timezones and usually people enter a date relative to where they are located. This gets even more complicated with webinars.
Hi @edwardpeters, thanks for the feedback! I have been waiting after dev/core#2122, where folks from Agileware seem to be working on it. They seem pretty close to a solution.
If not, I have a duct-tape solution in the timezone extension, but it's more a proof of concept and not really suitable for general use. A small tweak would be required in this extension.
By and large this extension is working well for me, so thanks for making it happen. Recently I've had a couple of people get in touch to query the .ics file that they 've received. In both cases when they import the .ics into their calendaring system it reports the event as one hour later than the timing that is included in the .ics.
When I open the .ics in a text editor I can see clearly that it states the timezone at Europe/London (we're based in the UK), and it gives start and end time correctly, e.g. start at 1330 end at 1630, but my users report a start time of 1430 and end time 1730.
I'm wondering if this is related to daylight savings (we're currently at GMT+1 and the autumn we'll go back to GMT+0)
As I say I've only had two people report this issue to me, out of several hundred that have registered for events since we've been using the extension. And of course I don't know if this is related to this issue - but thought it helpful to report it here.
Update: in discussion with one of the users reporting this issue, they confirm that they are using Outlook, and it reads my .ics file as UTC. Hence the reported difference. This user works in multiple timezones as a matter of course, and they are confident that their end is solid, and that the issue is with the .ics that Civi has provided.
Here's the relevant data from the .ics file in question:
To me this looks explicitly set to Europe/London, but makes no mention of daylight savings (I've always assumed that is taken into account with this method of describing timezones, but who knows), so it is interesting that my user's Outlook system reads this file as containing times in UTC.
This issue - dev/core#2887 (closed) and the subsequent work done by Agileware looks like it could be very helpful here. I've implemented the patch they've provided and it appears to resolve the issue with respect to the .ics files that I can download from the event information page, but don't appear to impact this extension.
This from Francis at Agileware, when I mentioned this extension:
"The Event ICS extension re-implements the part of the iCalendar page that this [patch] changes, so we can't address it directly in this patch. That said, it's using the same template as the download link, so the changes could easily be applied in that extension."
Apologies - not as yet. I stopped using this extension because of this issue. I'm happy to have a look, but can't promise that this will happen in the short term.