title: building timezone feature in PHP web application
body: <p>This is almost similar question to this one: -</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/346770/dealing-with-timezones-in-php">Dealing with timezones in PHP</a></p>
  
  <p>I read that thread, and have some more issues, and not sure of how to elegantly build timezone support in PHP/MySQL application.</p>
  
  <p>I am writing an application in PHP, where users can select their timezone.</p>
  
  <p>Here, all timestamps are stored in GMT in MySQL. And I am converting the timezone back to users timezone, when presenting the data. </p>
  
  <p>Now these are the problems I am facing: -</p>
  
  <p>1)
  I show the user, a list of timezones populated from MySQL's timezone tables, it is a HUGE list and is  difficult to chose from.</p>
  
  <p>So, I want to implement something like windows time zone list. Offset with region info.</p>
  
  <p>2)
  The PHP and MySQL may have different set of list.</p>
  
  <p>3)
  Where should I convert timezones, in PHP or in MySQL? I have combination of coding.
  Sometimes it is easy to select a column converted from MySQL, sometimes it is easy to convert in PHP.
  So, here the previous point becomes very important. For example, in MySQL's time_zone tables
  Asia/Kolkata, and Asia/Calcutta both were there, but in PHP 5.2.6's default timezonedb, only Asia/Calcutta is present.</p>