Trying to find information on this, but am I right in seeing that any adjustment to something in the CMS changes it’s original publishing date?
I found this forum post from TWO YEARS ago asking for the most fundamental ability that most CMS’ have of being able to edit posts without making them appear to be newly published (either because of typos, or additional fields being necessary, or literally whatever reason I care to), and now I’m terrified to publish my site because I don’t want the first blog post we did – which I needed to edit – to show up as new.
How are people handling this? How has Webflow not addressed this? How did I get this far along with using Webflow without realizing it had three date fields that were meaningless as far compared to any other platform had ever handled them?
I remember this thread from a couple of years ago and it was never followed up on by Webflow. Sad. I use WordPress instead when clients need a publishing system.
This feels insane. I haven’t published our site in a couple of days because I adjusted a typo in a blog post and now I don’t want to publish and have the dates all shift.
Surely there is something I’m overlooking. How has this been a thing for this many years? I can’t defend it to my team and they’re all going to think we were crazy for building on webflow as a result.
I just published our site after changing a typo in this post that was originally published and scheduled for May 3rd. Now the site and the CMS show it was published 2 minutes ago. It’s completely nonsensical.
If you’re pulling the publish date on the front-end, I would just switch it to pull from the created date. I believe the modified date is used internally. There’s no real front-end use for it.
I can’t use the created date either if I can’t edit. Typical editorial workflows provoke sometimes days between creation and publishing, let alone actually trying to schedule out a content calendar or have things scheduled to publish in the future so I don’t have to babysit the website whenever we publish something.
It also doesn’t help the other issue of RSS feed items only pulling from published date, so any edit we ever make will publish a new entry in the RSS feed.
I’m about to pitch our organization to switch our magazine to publish on Webflow, but manually adding a publish date is going to be obnoxious for future magazine editors.
From the outside this seems to be such a trivial change (eg. make separate “last updated” and “published” fields by default)… is there any where we can push this as a feature request?
@ptrbkr I just started with Webflow and I’m encountering this issue for the first time. It’s looking as though this will destroy my ability to migrate from WordPress to Webflow. I need to be able to keep the published dates intact and editing the article should not change the published date. Has Webflow addressed this issue at all? What is the current advice?
Webflow’s internal published date does not reflect the date an item was first published, it reflects the most recent date it was published. Therefore every time you make a change of any kind to a CMS item record, and republish it, that date is updated.
Yes people are getting confused. Yes, the UI could probably be clearer about that, but remember that Webflow is not a blogging platform, it’s a website design platform.
If you want a “first published” date for blogging purposes, just create a date field, and you have full control over that.
I run about 8 blogs on WF, and this approach works great, RSS included.
Your exact fear is what just happened to me. My first post showed up as new at the top, so I had to unpublish, but now that breaks a bunch of links linking to it. I hope I find a solution in here.
