Add time-zone field on user

[RJV333]

What is the goal of this PR and why is this important?

#819 Sets Pacific Time as the default time zone for the app.

Pivoting to using time-zone field on users with a site default of Pacific time.

[jmilljr24]

Timezones make my head spin. I believe you are correct that config.time_zone only affects rails time not the DB time. However thoughtbot recommends against changing this.

The default time zone in Rails is UTC. As tempting as it may seem, it is best to leave the application-wide time zone as UTC and instead allow each individual user to set their own time zone.

I'm not sure if there would be any consequences of setting time_zone now and adding a user setting later.

[maebeale]

oh, fascinating, @jmilljr24 !

@RJV333 what do you think? i'm leaning toward not doing this systemwide (and removing the other places we're saying PST explicitly too) and instead moving the user-specific TZ stuff to top of the queue.

any chance you'd want to pick that up (regardless of if we do or don't set system TZ)?

[RJV333]

oh, fascinating, @jmilljr24 !

@RJV333 what do you think? i'm leaning toward not doing this systemwide (and removing the other places we're saying PST explicitly too) and instead moving the user-specific TZ stuff to top of the queue.

any chance you'd want to pick that up (regardless of if we do or don't set system TZ)?

Thanks for the helpful feedback @jmilljr24 and @maebeale, and I agree. I'm pivoting this PR to track user-specific 'time-zone' like the blog suggests. It looks like there's some whackness with the specs right now that I think is unrelated to these changes, but I'll prioritize finishing this. In summary I'm planning to finish:

• Adding a 'time_zone' column to the users table with default 'Pacific Time'
• Update application_controller to 'use' a user's time_zone when they're performing an action
• Update user form to adjust time_zone if they want to change from Pacific
• Update specs around creating, storing, and retrieving event datetimes from different user time_zones
• Update Event 'show' to include the timezone an event is being displayed in for extra clarity.

[jmilljr24]

@RJV333 Niice!