On the Builder.com website, there's a new tutorial demonstrating how to use the PEAR Date class to make switching between time zones a snap.

To be fair, PHP has built-in time zone functions to help with this, but these aren't particularly intuitive and require a fair amount of time to get used to. A quicker alternative is to use the PEAR Date class, which comes with built-in support for time zones and is, by far, the simplest way to perform these conversions.

This tutorial will teach you how to convert temporal values between time zones with the PEAR Date class. It assumes that you have a working Apache and PHP installation and that the PEAR Date class has been correctly installed.

They go with a few simple examples to introduce you to how things work:

• just taking in and echoing back out the date
• taking in the date and echoing it back out in a different format
• making a simple time zone conversion
• convert the timestamp to local time
• finding the offset for the time stamp from GMT
• adding and subtracting time stamps