[L5] Dealing with time, timezones and dates in booking, time managing app?

I would recommend you to use a normal Y-m-d H:i:s format in your databases because it's easier to read than a unix timestamp. Furthermore you can use Carbon for handling dates and timezones in PHP and MomentJS for javascript handling. Sounds like a cool project by the way!

I would do something like this

migration

$table->dateTime('order_date'); // Or whatever you want to call the field

model

class Serving extends Model {
    
    protected $dates = ['order-date']; 
    // When you fetch the serving model Laravel will create a Carbon instance out of the date from the database 

    // Other model stuff
}

So when you do something like this

dd($serving->order_date); // This will return a Carbon instance.

On account of timezones - when you render a Carbon instance to string it doesn't convert datetime to some default timezone, this need to be handled manually. If you and your customers all live in the same timezone, just set it in config/app.php and in database settings.

When managing multiple timezones and different users have different timezone selected, it makes sense to have everything in database and in code UTC-based and perform timezone conversions only before output. Also if users set dates and times in form fields - those are gonna need to be converted as well.

I had a similar question with event dates while also taking into account the time zone. Read a bunch of different things on stackoverflow regarding whether to use DATETIME or TIMESTAMP types when storing in MySQL and still not fully clear. I understand the difference between the two, and while TIMESTAMP incorporates UTC and thus can handle time zone when converted, it seemed to be recommended to save calendar dates as DATETIME.

With that in mind I did see that Laravel has an available migration column type of datetime with time zone using $table->dateTimeTz('created_at');. @bobbybouwmann any experience with this type and handling time zones? It might also be a mute point if Carbon can easily handle a date and converting it to a specified time zone, which I believe is possible :)

@weerd Yeah Carbon is the perfect match here.

I would recommend you to either store the dates in the same format. So you would store the datetime in the UTC format and then have an extra column with the original timestamp. This way you can always convert it to the correct date. It's also possible to have this timestamp format on your user object for example.

Moment js can help too. It can get the users current time zone. (Well guess)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24174807/using-moment-js-to-display-the-users-local-zone-abbreviation