I am working with a fresh install of php 5.3.0 and I am getting blocks of errors like this:

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Anchorage' for 'AKDT/-8.0/DST' instead in /Users/dan/Sites/pfrr/wp-includes/functions.php on line 112

from pages in wordpress.
I did a few google searches but mostly found web sites with similar errors, not discussions about what is causing the error.

Any ideas?

The only thing I can think of is that this has changed in recent versions. You are now required to define the timezone:

http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

before you call date();

Make sue your timezone string exists or is valid.

Yes this works. But if you are using software like Wordpress and do not want to re-edit files every update, or worry about where to place the above funciton you can edit your own php.ini file.

Place a line like:

date.timezone = "America/Anchorage"

You can find valid time zone strings at http://nl3.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php

Thanks for the help!

I'm getting the same errors and put a date.timezone = "America/Chicago" directive in /etc/php.ini, but I'm still getting the errors after a complete restart:

[Sat Aug 01 16:33:09 2009] [notice] Apache/2.2.12 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.0 configured -- resuming normal operations
[Sat Aug 01 16:34:25 2009] [error] [client ::1] PHP Warning: set_magic_quotes_runtime() [function.set-magic-quotes-runtime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Chicago' for 'CDT/-5.0/DST' instead in /Library/WebServer/Documents/roundcubemail-0.2.2/program/include/iniset.php on line 62

Got any ideas?

Yes, create a test page with just displaying the phpinfo() output. Find out what the configured location should be of your php.ini

It might be in /usr/local/php5/lib/ instead of /etc

thanks Dan it works on me. i use opensuse and on the /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini on [Date] part date.timezine i enter Europe/Sofia with out "" and it works.