Feed item create date is cron run time

I did confirm that the following works when executed alone:

    $node = array('type' => 'feed_item');
    $values['title'] = 'Some title';
    $values['date'] = '2007-04-23 23:09:35 -0500';
    $values['name'] = 'webchick'; // some user
    $values['format'] = 1;
    $values['body'] = 'Some description';
    $values['expires'] = 0;
    $values['url'] = 'http://example.com/';     
    $values['fid'] = 538; // some feed id
    drupal_execute('feed_item_node_form', $values, $node);

So now it's a question of whether the $item->get_date is failing or whether the format_date function is being used incorrectly. It appears to be neither... this is generated from a couple var_dumps right before:

    // create a new feed-item node, adding in all of the other node defaults
    drupal_execute('feed_item_node_form', $values, $node);

DATE:string(22) "24 April 2007, 1:36 am"

VALUES:array(9) {
  ["title"]=>
  string(4) "test"
  ["date"]=>
  string(25) "2007-04-23 23:36:06 +0000"
  ["name"]=>
  string(16) "Drupal SoC Group"
  ["format"]=>
  string(1) "1"
  ["body"]=>
  string(106) "

ignore me

SoC 2007
"
  ["expires"]=>
  string(1) "0"
  ["url"]=>
  string(34) "http://groups.drupal.org/node/3794"
  ["fid"]=>
  string(2) "83"
  ["taxonomy"]=>
  array(1) {
    ["tags"]=>
    array(1) {
      [2]=>
      string(6) "Drupal"
    }
  }
}

so as you can see, Simplepie seems to be parsing the date properly, and Drupal's sticking it in the $values['date'] field as you'd expect.

Now, it's worth pointing out that above was generated during a manual feed refresh, and not a cron run... and seems to work properly (?!). For some reason, hitting cron.php isn't picking up new feeds even though I know they're there...

I give up on this for tonight. :(

Wow, this patch gets the official 'biggest, most obscure pain in the ass' award. ;)

The short version is that there is code in node_submit() that only changes the $node->created time if you're a node admin. Which means when your cron job is running as an anonymous user, it bypasses this code, and the $node->created stays NULL (which means it'll be the current date/time).

So, to compensate, you need to set the created time sometime after node_submit() does its thing. You have two opportunities: one is simplefeed_item_submit() (which I tried, but it killed feed creation for some reason), and the other is hook_nodeapi op submit, which this patch implements.

Many thanks to Ted for working through the problem w/ me on IRC. :)

And actually, you need to fix the uid here as well for the same reason.