Louis Winthorpe III: Fifty bucks? No, no, no. This is a Rouchefoucauld. The thinnest water-resistant watch in the world. Singularly unique, sculptured in design, hand-crafted in Switzerland, and water resistant to three atmospheres. This is the sports watch of the '80s. Six thousand, nine hundred and fifty five dollars retail!
Pawnbroker: You got a receipt?
Louis Winthorpe III: Look, it tells time simultaneously in Monte Carlo, Beverly Hills, London, Paris, Rome, and Gstaad!
On the off chance you don't have access to a Rouchefoucauld, and if many of your visitors are coming from all over the world, or if you are doing a number of posts that require your readers to switch between timezones (i.e. events, stargazing, travel, etc.), timezone awareness is critical.
Happily, there are multiple timezone plugins for WordPress® that make timezone management a manageable proposition. Here are a few of them:
TimeZoneCalculator
Downloaded more than 27,000 times, TimeZoneCalculator has been in ongoing development since 2005. As such, there are flavors of it that are backward-compatible all the way to WordPress 1.5. It has a drag-and-drop admin interface and is based on the PHP timezones database.
XorBin Digital Flash Clock
If you're going for the retro look, XorBin’s Digital Flash Clock might fit the bill. It's easy to set the display timezone and has a variety of skins to choose from. XorBin also offers an Analog Flash Clock and Countdown Clock.
LocalTime
The LocalTime plugin automatically translates post dates and times into a visitor's timezone. In the example above, the Final Gear site is automatically translating the time of the next episode of Top Gear US into my local timezone, even though all of the site times are created in GMT + 0. This is a great use of this plugin. If you need to automatically show information that is translated in time to the recipient's timezone, such as for an upcoming event, this is one to check out.
One note: This plugin has not been updated for a while, so be sure to test it with your WordPress installation before committing to it.
In additions to the plugins above, there's also a fun JourneyCalculator based on the TimeZoneCalculator, which is highly useful if you or your site visitors are traveling between international timezones. It does wonderful things like telling you not only the duration of your trip, but also which direction and how far to change your watch across dozens of destinations worldwide. So, world traveler: what tips, tricks and plugins do you use to manage international timezone issues on your site?
