WordPress MU

Wordpress MU's date and time is almost one day ahead of actual UTC -5 time on the server.

What could be causing this?

Check your TZ setting for each blog on the Settings/General page. For many of mine it was set to Abidjan

No joy. I can't figure out how to set the timezone to such a thing. It just offers UTC +/- an integer, not a country to choose from. Remembering the Automattic Timezone plugin had the country selection feature, I enabled the plugin and it was already set to New York. I changed it to Chicago to match where I am now. To be thorough, I checked the current server time by logging in via PuTTY and checking it. It says "Mon Aug 17 20:49:27 UTC 2009"

Here's what Automattic Timezone plugin displays.

Current Timezone Selection is: America/Chicago (UTC-5)
This timezone is currently in daylight savings time.

Current Server Time (UTC) is: 2009-08-18 4:45:55
Time in America/Chicago is: 2009-08-17 23:45:55

How is it that the current server time according to Wordpress is so far ahead of the actual server time? Also, the time in America/Chicago setting is off by more than 10 hours!

There ought to be an open field for setting the time in WPMU. I am currently running 2.7.1, but even 2.8.4a doesn't have a manual clock set field. I checked my 2.8.4a install and it has the exact same problem. Both installs are doing their own voodoo math with the server time.

Well the two time zones show the right difference which is something.

But why does PHP report such a different time?

If you create a file called info.php and put the following in it:

<?php

// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();

?>

What does it show for the Date Section?

The date section shows:

date/time support 	enabled
"Olson" Timezone Database Version 	2007.9
Timezone Database 	internal
Default timezone 	UTC

Directive	Local Value	Master Value
date.default_latitude	31.7667	31.7667
date.default_longitude	35.2333	35.2333
date.sunrise_zenith	90.583333	90.583333
date.sunset_zenith	90.583333	90.583333
date.timezone	no value	no value

What do you get if you create this file:

<?php
echo date(DATE_RFC822);
?>

and execute it from the command line on the server using the php command line.

I'm trying to work out if its PHP in general or WP that's messed up.

right now, as of 4:06pm 8/18/09 CDT, it says "Wed, 19 Aug 09 04:59:42 +0000"

So its PHP that's screwy. Can you edit your php.ini file to put in a default TZ for it?