15 June 2011, 7:53

Hi,

I have just upgraded my local version of Mahara to 1.4 to have a bit of a play with before uploading to live sesrver over the summer holidays.

When I first log in (and when I then view the Administration page) I get the following warning.

'PHP on your website host does not return a useful value for the timezone identifier (%z) - certain date formatting, such as the LEAP2A export, will be broken. %z is a PHP date formatting code. This problem is usually due to a limitation in running PHP on Windows.'

I have amended my php.ini date.timezone to Europe/London (both in php folder and in apache/bin) and restarted my XAMPP Apache/MySQL, but still get the error.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks

15 June 2011, 18:15

Hi Wulle,

This is unfortunately a limitation of running PHP on Windows. The only way to fully fix this problem is to run Mahara on a Linux system.

That said however, most things will work just fine. The main problem we've noticed (which prompted us to add this warning) has to do with the formatting of dates in Leap2A portfolio exports.

Cheers,

Francois

15 June 2011, 20:48

Wullie:
       This is a problem our WAMP install shows too. You can see the workaround we came up with last year here: http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=2114 - we just applied it to our 1.4 install and it fixed things there too.
       Unfortunately, it did not get rid of the error message delivered to the admin page. We commented out that code, a "patch" I'm also not at all happy about since who knows what else it'll mask!

François:
       I noticed that yesterday you changed the bug tracker on what seems to be this issue (https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/671456) from "Fixed committed" to "Fix released" for 1.4. Is this a fix which will help us po' folks stuck in the WIndows world, and will that fix appear in the next 1.4 release? And will it get rid of the admin error message? We do not use Leap2A, so that's of no interest to us.
       Thanks.

15 June 2011, 22:05

Jeffrey: I think that bug was a separate one. So you'll still get the warning about Leap2A exports not working.

If you want to make it go away though, have a look at the commit which introduced it:

  http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commit/5e827024a823d747bbf8fd1e7fbd518453e40e21

Commenting out the following line should do it:

  $warnings[] = get_string('timezoneidentifierunusable', 'error');

Cheers,

Francois

03 April 2012, 23:59

This setting work for Moodle?

I have Moodle running on IIS with PHP 5.3.10 and this setting works.

But with Mahara running on Apache with PHP 5.4 it doesn't work and the only fix is use Linux?