Easy PHP Projects: Time Zone Conversion

Course details

Follow along with Easy PHP Projects to practice your PHP skills while solving real-world programming challenges. This project focuses on converting dates and times between time zones using PHP's built-in functions. Kevin Skoglund explains the history and purpose of time zones, along with quirks like daylight saving time, and then shows how to design location-sensitive webpages and to build a PHP-driven time zone calculator. Each tutorial offers practical PHP techniques suitable for any developer, including PHP beginners..

Learning objectives
Understanding the history and purpose of time zones
Setting a default time zone in PHP
Using the PHP DateTime and DateTimeZone classes
Working with daylight saving time transitions
Allowing users to select their time zone
Displaying times in the user's preferred time zone
Calculating the current times of major cities
Creating a complete time zone calculator

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Welcome
02 - How to use the exercise files

1. About Time Zones

03 - History
04 - UTC and time zone offsets
05 - Daylight saving time (DST)

2. Default Time Zone

06 - PHP time zone identifiers
07 - Set default in php.ini
08 - Set default at runtime

3. Working with Time Zones in PHP

09 - Understanding Unix time
10 - PHP procedural functions
11 - PHP DateTime
12 - PHP DateTimeZone
13 - DST transitions

4. User Time Zone Selection

14 - Create the form
15 - Add a time zone Selection-Option
16 - Include the time zone offset
17 - Improve offset formatting
18 - Store the time zone selection

5. Respect the User's Time Zone

19 - Display the current time
20 - Convert to user's time zone
21 - Challenge - Create a maintenance page
22 - Solution - Create a maintenance page
23 - Store dates in a database

6. Current World Times

24 - List time zones
25 - Challenge - Use major cities
26 - Solution - Use major cities
27 - Sort cities by offset
28 - More efficient sorting

7. Time Zone Calculator

29 - Create the form
30 - Time zone options function
31 - Convert the time zone
32 - Create date selectors
33 - Create minute selector
34 - Create hour selector
35 - Process date and time selections

Conclusion

36 - Next steps