By Passero on

I see that drupal doesn't know the difference between published date and creation date... when i create an article and don't publish it, so i can edit the article later and when it's finished i publish it, i see that drupal shows the creation date, not the published date. Is there a way to change it so the items on the frontpage show their published date and not creation date or isn't there a different field in the DB for that functionality? If so, is there a module that can help me out?

It's also a problem when for example, i start today with articla A, it's kinda big so it takes me a few days to complete it. Meanwhile, i published article B and C. When article A is finished and i publish it, it shows below B and C but i want it to show above B and C because i just published it...

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

profix898’s picture

profix898 commented

You can simply empty the 'Authored on:' field under 'Authoring information' when you publish the node. The date used will be the published date then.

Passero’s picture

Passero commented

oh thx, this looks great.

rkendall’s picture

rkendall commented

There is usually a way to achieve what you want, but I agree with your point. There is a legitimate argument for distinguishing between created and published date in some situations. For me this would likely be when putting archive content onto a new website.

MarekP’s picture

MarekP commented

This is an interesting and important question. I have the same problem, although my point of view is a bit different. I've been publishing photos and I have to distinguish between the date when a photo was captured and the published date. How to do it??

Thank you,

Marek

krisvannest’s picture

krisvannest commented

Ditto on that; see my previous posts at http://drupal.org/node/88568 (primary) and http://drupal.org/node/89197.

I'm still researching the hook_form_alter suggestion by pwolanin from my primary post, but it frankly looks a bit complicated for me to figure out all the related issues. I also found some interesting code snippets from IBM at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource6/ (see their Listing #11 & Listing #13) where they seem to take user content from a nice looking drop-down date widget (their Figure #9). I've got more research to do on it and will post if I come across an elegant solution.

smokey-1’s picture

smokey-1 commented

My strategy was to use workflow + actions modules. Then I created the following custom action to set created time to now(), planning to use this action when a node is published. I put this function in a custom sitename.module.

function action_set_created_to_now($op,$edit = array(), &$node) {
  switch($op) {
    case 'metadata':
      return array(
        'description' => t('Set created time to now'),
        'type' => t('Node'),
        'batchable' => false,
        'configurable' => false,
      );
    case 'do':
      $node->created = time();
      if (!$edit['defer']) {
        node_save($node);
      }
    break;
  }
}

In workflow, I have states "draft" and "published". Add the custom action to the transition from "draft -> published".

Hope that helps.