Changing Timezone for OpenBibilo Library system

OpenBibilo is an open source, simple, easy to use but a power library management system. It highly  suitable for low to mid volume libraries having low budget.

Last week I was implementing it for one of the library that wanted to use Singapore time. By default OpenBibilo follows the timezone of your hosted environment and there is no configuration to use a different timezone.

But you could easily change  it by following below steps:

• Replace all occurances of sysdate() used in SQL queries to UTC timestamp and add the required offset. There are around 19 occurances in the PHP files ( for version 0.0.7) ,   e.g sysdate() -->  (UTC_TIMESTAMP()+ INTERVAL 8 HOUR)
• There is one occurance of now(), that need to be replaced as well                                 e.g  now() -->(UTC_TIMESTAMP()+ INTERVAL 8 HOUR)
• These steps takes care of database timezone,
• One last step needed to maek sure your php dates are too on the same timezone. It can be done by setting timezone in shared\common.php. Just add below line in common.php date_default_timezone_set('Asia/Singapore');

That's it! Your timezone is set to whatever you want. Of course there is a better way of having this done in some common place. But this is quick way to set timezone at this point.