title: How to store repeating dates keeping in mind Daylight Savings Time
body: <p>I'm storing events in my database.  I have 'start' and 'end' date times, 'tickets_start' and 'tickets_end' (for when ticket sales actually start/end - as opposed to the start/end of the actual event).</p>
  
  <p>So far, I've built methods that do all the fun stuff like converting the date/times to GMT before saving, then back to their respective timezone for display.</p>
  
  <p>I'm storing the timezone in a varchar field with values like "America/New_York".</p>
  
  <p>But - now I need to start dealing with if the user wants to allow repeating events.  I've done it before, and it's not that big a deal, but never across multiple timezones.</p>
  
  <p>At first, I thought it'd be no big deal, but then realized that - if the initial start date was in July (as example), and it repeats every month for a year, at some point, Daylight Savings Time will make it so that the conversion from GMT will change a time differently.  One month, when converting 12:00, it would change it to -5, and the next, it would change it to -4 because of DST.</p>
  
  <p>My current thought is that I'll store a 'dst' tinyint(1) for whether the start/end dates were entered during DST, and then make a method to alter the time by an hour if/when necessary.</p>
  
  <p>But - figured I'd ask here in hopes maybe there's a "normal" for this or an easy something that I'm not thinking of.</p>
  
  <p>(cakephp 2.4.x)</p>