[Simplog-devel] Timezone support

[Jim Hu <ji...@ta...>]

Based on a recent post to the support bbs, I'm was thinking about  
taking a look at what patches are needed to make timezone support  
work in 0.92 (or 1.0).  This is to support users who aren't in the  
same timezone as their servers.  But then i started wondering...

Should the local time be used everywhere or only when dates and times  
are displayed?  In other words, it seems to me that there are two  
models:

1) Convert to local time before entering anything into the database
2) Save all the database timestamps as server time, and adjust only  
on display.

I think our current system is by default #1.  But I'm not sure that i  
understand totally how Simplog handles time and date.  It seems that  
there are places where strftime is called that might be  
redundant ...or not.

I'm leaning toward #2...I think it's simpler and better for hosting  
multiple blogs with users from different locations.  Timezone could  
be stored in the blog_users table or in the blog_list, or recovered  
somehow from the viewer, depending on what we'd want to see. I think  
the users who have been posting mostly want their blogs to be at  
their local time instead of server time, and they're not worried  
about converting for anonymous readers in other time zones...but I  
could be wrong about this.  But it seems to me that it shouldn't be  
hard to make each blog have it's own local time.

I'm just learning OO thinking, but it seems that in 1.0  perhaps the  
object classes should be split to improve decoupling.  For example,  
there are input/output/database(persistence?) methods that are shared  
by entries, comments, and perhaps other things like templates.  Each  
of these uses methods like marker_sub and preview, so they should  
share an interface object class that does these.  Things like  
handling the time displays would be delegated to the interface  
classes, and we'd get rid of methods that format the dates in  
class.BlogEntry.

Thoughts?

Jim Hu