Publication date and timezone

[mlbrgl]

Description

Placeholder for considering the implications of timezones on the publication date.

At the moment:

• in the DB: 2024-02-21 23:59:00
• rendered on the server: February 21, 2024
• rendered in the browser (CET/GMT+1): February 22, 2024

Revisit #3227 as part of this.

[ikesau]

When an author writes a manual dateline, they are (presumably) writing in GMT, which we treat as a string and therefore don't localize on any client.

To keep this consistent, I think it makes sense to not localize any date and always render in GMT

One downside to this is that it could mean you see something published "tomorrow" if you read an article in PT (i.e. San Francisco) late at night. This is already possible (albeit incredibly rare) with manual datelines, not sure if it's too huge of a concern.

Somewhat relatedly to sorting all of this out, #3228 never got merged so that issue also remains. We could change the gdocs publishing form to be a datetime picker as well (still in GMT) to give us proper control over this (though we would only show date to the user)

[edomt]

Thank you @ikesau — I think that's a perfectly fine tradeoff. The chances of us publishing something so early in the morning that someone in PT could read it before midnight are slim, and it won't be a big problem if it ever happens.