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Publishing changes to already published CMS item sets new publish time

Community resources Bugs
#1

If you publish a CMS item (for example a blog post), a publish time is set. Great for sorting blog posts by publish time, and the preferred sorting option for blogs etc.

However, if you make a change to it (for example fixing a typo) and publish the change, the old publish time is reset. This will put the blog post at the top of the site again, which is surely not intended. If you have to fix a months old blog post you don’t want it to get top spot on your home page.

Sorting by “created on” is not optimal, as you could have several blog posts in draft mode and intended to be published later - perhaps weeks later, meaning sorting your blog posts on your home page by “created on” puts them at the bottom.

2 Likes
RSS Feed items refreshes and are moved to the front when edited
#2

Hello,
​
​Riley here from the Webflow support team. Thank you so much for reaching out.

To prevent this mis-sorting from happening, there could be a new date field added into the collection that’s named “Original Publish” date. The sorting functioning could then sort by that date and won’t be affected from the modified published date.

Hopefully this helps a bit, and please let me know if you have any additional thoughts or questions.

Riley

Wrong Dates on Collection News List (video loom link)
#3

Hey Riley, thanks for answering :slight_smile:

Sure, but we’d have to manually update that field for every blog post. That’s not a great solution. Pretty much every other blog CMS has a field like that as standard. And what’s the point of having a “last edited” field when it’s likely to always be the same as “last published”, especially for blogs?

Can Webflow add a “originally published” field for us? It’s pretty much critical for a blog, and doubly so when you’re adding the set publish time feature soon. (Please don’t send me to the wishlist lol)

1 Like
#4

Nothing here @RileyJones ?
Saturating my blog posts with custom fields when it’s already extremely slow to use the editor to get around a bug isn’t a very good fix. Do you know if this will be fixed along the “set publish time” feature?

#5

Hi @Fonsume!

I completely understand the frustration in having to add dates to every blog post just to have the order you want. For now, that’s the only workaround in place.

We are working towards improving this kind of experience, but I don’t have a specific timeline of when this will be updated.

How often are you needing to update old posts?

#6

Great to hear that you’re working on it :slight_smile: That’s all I wanted to hear really.

It varies how often we need to update “old” posts, but it could potentially be every day, multiple times per day - we publish anything from 3 to 10 posts every day.

#7

Hi @Fonsume,

Brandon here stepping in for Riley to help with this issue. We like to work on these high priority issues as a team to make sure we solve them as quickly as possible for you.

Why are you updating old posts? Why not just create new posts that reflect these updates? What’s the reasoning behind updating so many older posts? If we knew the reasoning/direction for this choice we can help a bit more.

Have a Great Day and Happy Designing,
~ Brandon

#8

Hey Brandon,

Sure thing.

Why are you updating old posts?
Because sometimes we have typos in the posts or want to add an image or get new info about something or need to move something around in the text field or have the wrong image or forgot to optimize the image (btw relative images from the CMS systems doesn’t work) or want to add a reference to another post. Maybe an embed didn’t work as planned and we didn’t see it before we published. There are hundreds of reasons why we’d need to update a post/CMS item after it’s been published.

Why not just create new posts that reflect these updates?
I’ve never heard about anyone creating a new post because of a typo being fixed :slight_smile:

What’s the reasoning behind updating so many older posts?
With older post I mean any post that’s not the latest post we’ve published. I’m not talking about year-old posts here (though sometimes we do that too).

It just seems very strange to not have any built in way to sort on when anything was originally published, yet there are two very similar ones that shows when something was updated.

6 Likes
#9

@Fonsume,

Thank you for providing clarity here. I really do appreciate that.

After some discussion with other team members, we are gonna look into this matter further. However, no eta/timeframe on any fixes or updates to this.

Have a Great Day and Happy Designing,
~ Brandon

1 Like
#10

Wonderful stuff @WebDev_Brandon , thank you so much!

Having the option to actually set a publish time (also in the past) would be great too :slight_smile:
I bet a lot of people looking to import old blog posts etc. would be happy if that was implemented.

1 Like
#11

Hey Brandon,

Any updates here? It’s such a pain to have to manually add a “legacy publish date” to older drafts etc.

1 Like
#12

Hi Fonsume,

Nothing I can share here yet. :disappointed_relieved:

Have a Great Day and Happy Designing,
~ Brandon

#13

Echoing @Fonsume’s comments here. This is extremely basic functionality for a blog. Every other blog in the world works like this. It’s extremely common for someone to need to edit a blog post after it’s been published, and there is no realistic use case that when someone edits that post they also want it to immediately overwrite the original publish date.

Here are more use cases and reasons why people edit posts after they are already published:

  • Optimize the post for SEO, keywords
  • Update broken links in the post to external URLs that change over time
  • Update the post with new information, new data

All of these use cases, as well as the ones that @Fonsume should be encouraged by webflow, as they make people’s sites better and will help them generate more traffic.

Your suggested workaround of adding another date field to the post is not realistic. If the user forgets to update the field at the exact time that they publish the post, then the date won’t be accurate. which defeats the entire purpose of this.

3 Likes
#14

I agree 100% with this, super PITA not being about to edit but maintain original publish date. the publish data should be static! If you need a new publish date, then create a new blog post!

1 Like
#15

This bug also affects how the RSS feeds display, I believe. We have RSS feed readers and notifications through Zapier and Slack RSS that funnel edited posts into our feeds. Of course, users dont want to be notified of a spelling change, they only want to be notified when new content is published.

#16

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