Blog post "Published On" dynamic date not working

[boejucci (Joe Bucci)]

Hi all! I’m looking for some assistance on this - running into an issue where the date on all of our blogs is the same, regardless of publish date.

We have the “published on” date selected to dynamically populate at the top of all of our blogs. This date also shows up on our blog archive page (not sure if that’s the right term, but the page with all the blog posts).

For the majority of our blog posts, this is showing up as Sept 7, 2022, but they definitely weren’t all published on that date. I checked the dynamic text and I’ve selected the only option available for “Published On”.

Here’s a screenshot:

Can someone provide some insights and help me out? I’m new to webflow, so be kind

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Here is my public share link: LINK
(how to access public share link)

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Hey Joe, share your readonly site link, I’ll have a look.

[boejucci (Joe Bucci)]

Sorry for the delay! Here’s the link: Webflow - CareRev

I’m wondering if maybe this has something to do with the way we’re saving/publishing blogs and maybe accidentally updating their Published On date? But I don’t know.

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Yes, the built-in Published date that Webflow generates on collection items is updated every time you change and publish that item.

Most likely you went through and tweaked something in those records, and then on publishing those changes, all of those dates updated.

@vincent ran some tests here, and has a good explanation here.

Difference between dates in CMS items: created, published, modified

Ok I see, this is expected. And IMHO it’s a good thing, here’s why: The published date is updated each time you’re editing an item. You can read it as “the published date of the actual version of the CMS item”. Published date as you expect it to be would be the “original published date” as often seen on some sites and CMS. I think it’s OK because htis way you can’t be fooled about how old really is an item. Anyway, those 3 date fields are not necessarily meant to be shown in your pages, they’r…

The best approach is to not use these dates for any display purpose. Create your own dates. For my blogs I usually have a Published Date and a Last Updated date, since I want to track and display both.

Also, be prepared for a bit of a painful migration process. Adding those fields in and updating them with dates means every blog entry is going to get a new Published date. Every single one.

The best approach is probably to export them to CSV, and load it into a spreadsheet or Google Sheet so your team can see them and work with them safely. Add your columns there and figure out the correct dates. Then update from your sheet to the CMS. I suspect you’ll need to do that update manually, at the same time you update your CMS bindings throughout your site to the new date field.

If you have > 300 articles, it might be worth it to build a Google Sheet to CMS updater using Make.com, so you can push those dates in.

[premiumd (Den Clemente)]

Did you solve this already? I can’t figure out why it’s not showing the right on my end, too.