Times display wrong if viewed in external cal

I'm using WebCalendar v1.2.1.
This is our site: http://www.hptaonline.com/webcalendar/

All our events take place in -5GMT/New York/Boston
Our server is located in -8GMT/Vancouver

Under each User's "Preferences" the time zone is set to America/New York.
Under System Settings, our server time zone is set to America/Vancouver.

Many of our users view the calendar externally. They subscribe to it via Google Calendar or Apple iCal, etc. Dates/times entered into our calendar display correctly on our website, but some (not all) times display in GMT (or +5 from the correct time) when viewed in an external calendar. What we cannot figure out is why this happens with some events, but not others. We just started noticing it for November events, in case that's a clue. I have not figured out a pattern yet as to why it happens with some, but not all events. Happens with multiple users, not just the same user.

Example1: November 30 at 7:00pm Parent Program - Homework Made Simple (user=hpta), displays correctly on our website, but displays as Dec. 1 at 12:00am in Google Calendar. (Event added to the calendar on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 9:51pm EDT)

Example2: December 2 at 7:30pm School Committee Meeting (user=hps), displays correctly on both our website and in Google Calendar. (Event added to the calendar on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 3:54pm EDT)

I could upgrade to v1.2.3 if this would solve the problem. Very confused. Thanks for your input!

Amy

Version: WebCalendar v1.2.3
Site: http://www.teamdefiant.com/calendar/
local time set to GMT+5

I am also experiencing the same issues.  It appears to only be for events that begin at 19:00  hours.  A minute before or a minute after are fine.  It also appears to happen for all the publish/subscribe url's and for the exported ics files.  I suspect that this may be a "midnight" issue as 19:00 is midnight GMT.  While I have not tested this I expect that this problem will crop up for any event that begins at midnight GMT.  I hope these observation help in resolving the issue.

You are correct. Good catch! We switched a couple of times to 19:05 and the problem went away. We will do this for all 19:00 events for the time being. If someone knows of a more permanent solution, please keep us posted.

I did some more testing and reviewed the php code.  The best I can tell is that this only affects events that have a start time of Midnight GMT (value stored as 0 in webcal_entry.cal_time).  I believe the issue is somewhere in the function export_time (line 237 of xcal.php).  This issue should probably be reported as a bug.

Please be aware that the iCalclient.php and xcal.php are not fully tested and do not always work. It will not work in Outlook.

I and others have been able to get it to work on ThunderBird running Lightning. I have also heard that at least one user has iPhone working.

Agian icalclient.php is still in alpha level and has big warnings at the first of the script.

Steve

We have been using the publish.php instead of iCalclient.php. (I'm not sure of the differences between the two.) The publish.php generally works very well with Apple iCal, Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar Beta. Personally I subscribe to our school's webcalendar with Google Calendar and then I use Google Sync to sync it all to my Blackberry. It generally works great, except these quirks like events at midnight GMT not working and also recurring events don't always sync correctly. We came up with a tips page for parents at our schools on how to sync to your external calendar or smartphone. (We have found that it does not always work with Outlook.)
http://hptaonline.com/webcalendar/sourcebook-tips.html

Thanks!

hptaonline,

Thanks for sharing the link above. I'll see if I can find some time to take a look at the code and see if I can figure out what may be causing some of these issues. I would be nice to flesh out some of these as I have members also looking to use thier iPhones and calendar clients.

Steve