Publication date/time in the News XML Sitemap

In the News XML sitemap, we use the GMT date and time for your publication. This might cause confusion sometimes, but is exactly according to the specification. At the <publication_date> section the W3C site is linked, where it says:

“Times are expressed in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), with a special UTC designator (“Z”).”

UTC is the same timezone as GMT, just named differently. You can use one of the many time zone converters available on the web to determine if the time adjust was made correctly by WordPress.

There would be the other option of adding the date/time with a time zone designator, but we’ve found that’s much more error prone. Since WordPress already saves the GMT date/time in the database it’s actually also a lot easier from a development perspective.