Managing time zones — scheduling posts in your local time
VeloCMS stores all dates in UTC. Set your tenant timezone once and every scheduled-publish time you enter will automatically convert — no mental arithmetic required.
If you're in Tokyo and want a post to go live at 9 AM local time, you don't want to do mental gymnastics converting to UTC before typing the date. VeloCMS handles the conversion for you — once you tell it where you are.
Why does VeloCMS store times in UTC?
UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is timezone-neutral. The scheduled-publish worker runs in a server somewhere in the cloud — it doesn't know your local time and shouldn't need to. UTC timestamps never shift with daylight saving time, so a post you schedule for a spring morning won't accidentally publish an hour early or late when the clocks change. All times in the database are UTC. Everything in the admin panel is display.
How to set your blog's timezone
- Go to Admin → Settings.
- Scroll to the Timezone section.
- Select your timezone from the dropdown (e.g. Asia/Tokyo, America/New_York, Europe/London) or type an IANA timezone identifier directly.
- Click Save Timezone.
The timezone setting is per-blog (tenant). Each blog on VeloCMS can have its own timezone — useful if you manage blogs in different countries.
Scheduling a post
Open any post in the editor and look for the Schedule section in the right-hand Settings panel. The datetime input shows times in your configured timezone — the abbreviation (e.g. JST, PST) is displayed next to the field so you always know what zone you're working in. Pick a future date and time, save the post, and the status automatically flips to Scheduled. The publish worker checks every five minutes and fires when the UTC moment arrives.
What happens to existing scheduled posts when I change my timezone?
Nothing breaks. The stored UTC timestamp is unchanged — the scheduled post will still publish at the same absolute moment in time. What shifts is the displayed local time in your admin panel. If you had a post set for 09:00 UTC and you switch from UTC to Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9), the panel will now show it as 18:00 JST. Same publish moment, different clock face.
If you intended a post to publish at 9 AM Tokyo time but accidentally scheduled it in UTC, you will need to edit the scheduled time after changing your timezone — the UTC timestamp will not retroactively adjust.
Daylight saving time (DST)
DST is handled automatically. VeloCMS uses your IANA timezone identifier (e.g. America/New_York, not EST or EDT), which means the system always knows the correct UTC offset for any given date — whether it's summer or winter. You never need to manually switch between standard and daylight time.