PHP:
$date = date("Y-m-d G:i");
That will return the date/time in the format between the
"'s. I'm not sure, like I said in my orginal post if the ini_set() will set the date.timezone to the correct timezone, as I have not tested it myself. If you call that date() function like you posted AFTER you used the ini_set() function, (And ini_set() did successfully change the timezone), then your date() function should return the date/time in the timezone you set. If ini_set() did not work, your date/time will be returned in the CST (GMT -6) timezone.
You can check the return value from ini_set() to see what it returns. I believe if the function successfully changed the configuration value it will return
the old value, and if it didn't,
false. So if it "works", you can get the format of teh old timezone in the configuration file and see what the GMT timezone format should be.