Interspire Email Marketer showing wrong time after DST ended

Posted April 7th, 2009 in Interspire Email Marketer

I've recently started using Interspire Email Marketer which is a really good email marketing system but after New Zealand changed from DST (Daylight Savings Time) last Sunday to regular time I noticed all the times in the system were out by 1 hour and the time zone information in the top right area when logged in showed (GMT+13:00) which is wrong.

After a lot of messing around in the code and searching through the knowledge base etc I found that (and that I had forgotten) this was a setting in the user administration section of the email marketer interface.

Two things sent me wrong at the start:

1) A knowledge base article noted that there had been an issue when switching from DST and that upgrading to the latest version would fix it. I upgraded and it made no difference. It may for other timezone issues not related to mine.

2) There's a constant which stores the timezone in admin/includes/config.php but adding that into the file made no difference. Possibly this is deprecated? Again, as you will see below my issue was to do with two options for the NZ timezone.

The solution for me was pretty simple... Click the "User Accounts" option in the top navigation and then the "Edit" link next to the user details. These are highlighted with the red boxes in the example screenshot below:

The form has a "User Timezone" field. Simply open up the drop down box and select the correct timezone from it. As you can see in the screenshot below there are two options for New Zealand - the one with daylight savings and the one without. I changed it to the one without which fixed the problem.

Once you've made the change, click the "Save" button, logout and then log in again and the timezone change will now show in the top