I have been banging my head against a problem that has to do with passing FileMaker timestamp data to Drupal CCK date fields. Then, Andy alerted me to this post. So, it turns out that CCK date fields are stored in UTC format, which explains the -5 hrs time offset I was getting. Note this is not a Drupal config issue, ergo time wasted in wrong tree.

The solution was to convert my FileMaker timestamp to a UTC equivalent which presented a different problem. How does one make sure that the FileMaker file automatically recognize the user's timezone locale accounting for daylight savings?

I am not a big user of plugins but I must say that Scodigo's SmartPill PHP plugin is among my top 5 favs. Once again, SmartPill came to the rescue. With the simple PHP date('Z') function, I was able to get the UTC offset value in seconds (time units) and passed on to the proper UTC-ized field. I do love PHP and SmartPill!

Cheers,