Why dates can be complicated. And practical solutions.

Description

Handling dates and time is easy, until it isn't. I'll run through some stumbling blocks. From the general, through PHP, to the Drupal modules. Ever wanted to display repeating events in a different way? Register for them? Handle multiple or changing timezones? Simply just order by day? Or allow dates with a different granularity (accuracy)?

We will look at the underlying storage, the types of queries views makes, and how they can be pretty slow. There will be schemas, and some code, but described so an advanced site builder can avoid suboptimal configurations. Yes, there will be sql query timings.

We'll also see how the standards develop, how understanding them - and maybe using them better - might help solve some of our problems.

Slides https://ekes.gitlab.io/2025-date/