php date() function displaying wrong time
I Dont use word press so im not sure but it sounds like there is a setting in wp that is applied using date_default_timezone_set(). Its probably configured to GMT to allow for easy calculation of user preferences from within WP. I would look to see if this is configurable in WP, or do the math youself using the necessary functions and/or objects.
The Wordpress template tag the_time displays according to your Wordpress defaults: Template Tags/the time « WordPress Codex. date() may get over written by Wordpress. But you can look at the_time usage and code samples to change the output more to what you need: Formatting Date and Time « WordPress Codex
Try using the date_i18n() function available in Wordpress, I had a similar problem and used that function rather than date(). Check out the WP docs - http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/date_i18n