I'm trying to create a list of translated timezones, but I'm finding the variety of options pretty overwhelming.
I wanted to avoid having to store GMT offsets and DST flags, and instead store PHP area/location values (http://us.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php) which I could fetch via timezone_identifiers_list() ( http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.timezone-identifiers-list.php), but it seems to be pretty impractical to display that entire list to end users. There's a lot of ambiguity in list as well. For example, US/Arizona and America/Phoenix; America/Havana and Cuba; UTC and UCT. Additionally, PHP doesn't offer any translations so there was no way I was going to do that myself. I thought I'd have a little more luck using Zend_Locale getting translations, so I looked at the CityToTimezone list. For some reason, Zend_Locale_Data::getList('en', 'CityToTimezone') only returns three results. Other locales returned various different counts (es: 83, el: 293), so I'm a bit confused how to use it. I also tried the WindowsToTimezone list which seems promising as a compromise of completeness vs usability, but there were ambiguous entries (US Mountain and Mountain) in the list and none of the results were coming back translated. I tried search Google for a bit, but I wasn't able to find any recommendations or guidelines for timezone selection, so I'm at a dead end. Any suggestions?
