Change creation date to publishing date

Do we need a new column and a few other changes here and there for this?
This issue came up through this: #216961: Make author/submitted by separate toggles

I don't know when you'd want to display the creation date rather than the published date, but it probably is information that you still want to retain. I think displaying the published date is better, but if a node is published, unpublished and then re-published, which published date do you display? The first time it was published or the latter?

The basic thing I think is we need two distinct dates:
A consistent write-once date: node creation date.
A user controlled write-many date: publish date.

Subscribing. A "published date" separated from the creation date is something Drupal should have.

Subscribing. A "published date" separated from the creation date is something Drupal should have.

http://drupal.org/project/publication_date

I was able to get the Publication Date module to work in my View of News Articles, but the date on each node remains the creation date. The instructions with the module says the following:

This will add a new field $node->published_at, containing 'false' if the
node is not published yet, or containing the publication date otherwise.
You can then use this field in any templates.

How does one add this to the template?

Thanks for your help!

Stuart

Well, the needs is filled by a custom module and the features doesn't belong to Drupal core. Closing.