I'm glad you posted this Aubrey,

This very thing and also on the countries list is on my list of this to do. I would have been asking these on Monday.

I only want to include some of the countries and some of the time zones to shorten up the list. When new people signing up see such lengthy choices, it can give them reason to bail in signing up.

There must be a master file somewhere probably in the Bootstrap stuff. ????

I totally agree with Aubrey. Unfortunately this has to do with Joomla's time system. 24 time zones would have been much more appropriate in my honest opinion. Theoretically ES could create their own set of time zones that tell php what zone to use for Joomla. But I don't know how practical that is (in the technical aspect) or how extensive that would be.

It would be nicer to have the time zones simplified. Right now it feels like way too many options. A country field is different because the user knows exactly what country they want to select, but with a time zone that is different.

Is there not a way to move the most common timezones to the top of the list. Or the most common countries to the top of the list?

Perhaps this should be a feature request to the Joomla development Team for a new version of Joomla? We can't be the only Joomla users that have this issue.

Make a list of supporters on the forums here, and write up a feature request from as many stackIdeas customers as we can and then submit it to the Joomla Team for consideration. Sometimes we have to consider that we might be asking way to much of the StackIdeas Team, when we should be asking for the Joomla Team to address the core issues.

The page for this on Joomla.org is as follows: http://ideas.joomla.org/forums/84261-joomla-idea-pool

Joomla Idea Pool
Welcome to the Joomla Idea Pool. Please add your suggestions here for future versions of Joomla and vote on current suggestions.

What features would you like to see in future versions of Joomla?

If we agree on the feature to ask, then we can get people to start voting for it to be accepted. So far after a quick search I found only 1 feature request for Time zone. This got one vote:

Add Seattle to Server Time-Zone Options

I would really love to see Seattle, WA added to the list of options for the server-time zone settings in the Joomla admin. I know of a lot of other Joomla website designers who would agree. It's a little confusing not to have a major city like Seattle making the list. Please consider!

So the question to ask is: What features would you like to see in future versions of Joomla?

Let's put the best wording together for the feature title to get people's attention, and then we can put the best paragraph outlining the reason why the request should be taken as a high priority.

SUGGESTIONS?

Randall M wrote:I only want to include some of the countries and some of the time zones to shorten up the list. When new people signing up see such lengthy choices, it can give them reason to bail in signing up.

A couple things I want to note. I personally am against requiring my users to select a country, but that's just my opinion. This makes sign up for "lazy" people easier. However having the option there is good too.

The current method for accessing countries is pretty good (the custom field called "countries"). You can type a few letters and the country comes down which is very nice. But it would be even better if it used the same methods as Joomla 3's module position drop down. It displays the entire drop down list as soon as you click the select field, but of course allows you to search for the name anyways. This allows the best of both worlds (searching and drop down select). Right now ES it's very close, but ES's country drop down requires a letter to be typed to show the list.

Randall M wrote:Make a list of supporters on the forums here, and write up a feature request from as many stackIdeas customers as we can and then submit it to the Joomla Team for consideration.

As far as I understand it, Joomla isn't so much a "team" as much as a collaboration of contributors. Public awareness is a great start to sparking interest in making change to Joomla. But we would also need to be able to get a developer who was interested in adding the feature. There are many things that should be built into the core of Joomla that aren't. Many developers know what those things are. Typically an individual has to come out and be willing to create the new feature/change. There are testers too.

Hey guys,

The timezone list that is generated is based on the timezone that Joomla offers. Although we can remove some of them but what about users who might be looking at these other timezones? Perhaps this could be made configurable in the future

That would be good. Would a manager be better or switching between "All Joomla Time Zones" or "Simplified 24"?

Hm, that would be ideal too but I am not sure if using 1 - 24 offset values would even confuse users more. We'll see what we can do in the future

The offset values would display the most popular city within that time zone rather than just a number. So for example you might see (-8 Los Angles).

Hm, not sure if I understand you here but wouldn't that fall into the same problem again?

Curious to know: Why is the time zone setting so important?

1. I have signed up to tons of social and forum based sites and have never been asked to give my time zone.

2. Why can't the user just click n a Location like in the Share Stream and the location is autodetected. 1 click or 2 it most does it. No having to sort through a huge list to find a time zone.

This would take care of the timezne and the city and the country and address and save the person that is registering the hassle of having to fill everything out or select a timezne and country etc.

People are more mobile today and location changes. Using a: What is your location? One click brings up the list. Select one in the list. Done!

Be innovative. The more simplified the registration, the better.

Neat idea Randal. Some of us don't use mobile phones. So what if there was a "fall back" auto detect that used your filled in location on the profile to figure out your time zone. I know FireFox and such has the ability to roughly figure out your location, but some users may feel uncomfortable to say yes because they don't know how literal it is.

Thanks for the heads up on this guys