I’m about to install write.freely on my server but have one question before I start. In the official install guide, it mentions that if I use MySQL then the database timezone needs to be UTC. Is this essential? What happens if it’s not? I assume that it’s also ok to use Mariadb? I already have a few databases on my server and they are set to my local timezone ie europe/london. My system, and PHP is also set to this aswell so I don’t really want to have to change it all for the sake of a single web app. If it is essential to change to UTC then I guess I could just use SQLite instead.
It is important that the database timezone matches your server timezone. If they don’t, posts may not appear publicly. If that timezone is not UTC, the server will assume it is UTC, and so the times posts are made may be reported inaccurately.