This issue appeared when I upgraded from Sitecore 7.5 to Sitecore 8. Suddenly my dates on the website were 2 hours behind – on my development server it was one hour behind.
In Sitecore, my date-time was (example) 2015-04-12 00:00:00. This date was presented as 2015-04-11 22:00:00+2.
The issue arises, because Sitecore have implemented a feature that tries to handle local time zones on the server. Old Sitecore 7.5 dates are stored without any timezone information:
- 20150412T000000
In Sitecore 8, Sitecore have changed the raw data format of the date field by taking the timezone into consideration. Which in my case means that my 2014-04-12 00:00:00 becomes 2015-04-11 22:00:00:
- 20150411T220000Z
Notice the “Z” at the end? This implies that this is a datetime that have a timezone, and the timezone is now 2 hours behind UTC.
To fix the old datetime fields, I need to tell Sitecore which timezone non-timezone-datetime fields have. This is the setting, ServerTimeZone:
<setting name="ServerTimeZone" value="UTC" />
I also needed to update the Lucene index, as the invalid datetime was added to the index as well.
Thanks to Peter Wind who helped find this issue.
MORE TO READ:
- Settings Supporting UTC Implementation by Sitecore
- New web.config settings in Sitecore 8 by Sitecore Ottawa
