topic Re: How can you backdate a published blog post? in CMS Development

How can you backdate a published blog post?

TDegrande — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:58:20 GMT

We want to publish some release note related blog posts highlighting key features per release, and also do it for historical releases. Can we backdate blogs with a publish date in the past?

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

Phil_Vallender — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 09:22:31 GMT

Hi @TDegrande

To do this you set the publishing date in the publishing options (hidden behind the dropdown arrow on the publish button) to your desired date in the past.

See here for more info: Set a blog post's publish date and time

If everything still works the same, blog posts published with a date in the past will not trigger blog digest emails or automatic social publishing. Keep an eye on things thought in case anything unexpected happens.

Hope this helps?

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

Jen0910 — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 20:04:07 GMT

I recently published 10+ blog posts and gave them all older dates when I published. They are all just showing up at the top of the blog page with the actual publish date - not the date that I specified. Why isn't this working? I swear it worked in the past.

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

CPye — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 14:52:27 GMT

I've tried this and it doesn;t work despite HubSpot confirming the schedule update was successful. Seems like the function is geared towards scheduling future dates but not backdating. Used to be able to do that easily by selecting diary date.

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

CPye — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:29:54 GMT

It turns out that it does work, it just took a while to update.

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

BKroetsch — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:07:09 GMT

Is this still a thing? Because I cannot even select a date in the past beyond yesterday...
We were just about to import our old blog posts from our previous site instance and were hoping to keep the original dates.

I even used the blog post importer, which showed that it correctly had the old date, and then still set the creation date to today...

Edit: ok, it is still possible, but only through the editor...

Through the blog post list, you can only plan for the future, but backdating is forbidden here.

I also got confused with the creation date vs publishing date because the latter wasn't even shown in the list initially.

Not really good design to have similar functions with different limitations, based on where you initiate them, but the function is there, that's something.

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

BérangèreL — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:34:08 GMT

Hi @BKroetsch and welcome, we are delighted to have you on the HubSpot Community!

Thanks so much for sharing the solution, this will be very helpful to many other Community Members, we really appreciate it! ❤️

Also, I'd like to thank you for sharing your valuable feedback! This means a lot to us.

I have shared it internally to bring more visibility to it.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can help with. I'll be delighted to do so!

Have a wonderful day! 🌞

Bérangère, HubSpot Community Manager

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

BKroetsch — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:01:17 GMT

Thanks, and I'd like to make a small addition to the feedback:

being able to backdate a post is currently a lot of effort, because every update done to a post will update the publish date to the current moment.

And if you just spotted a small mistake and intent to quickly correct it, it's easy to throw away the backdating.

That's half-way to defeating the point of backdating in the first place.

But since the publish date is technically the "last modified" date, the behavior is logical for that function.

So maybe it should be possible to backdate a post by altering it's creation date instead, at least when using the importer.

Re: How can you backdate a published blog post?

BarryGrennan — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:37:20 GMT

Hi @BKroetsch,

@BKroetsch wrote:
publish date is technically the "last modified" date

This isn't true. Published date is published date. Last modified is last modified. If they're showing up differently that down to the theme you're using.
Go into your template and make sure that it's using {{content.publish_date}} (or similar) not {{content.updated}} or similar.

Barry Grennan

Freelance HubSpot CMS Developer

Website | Contact | LinkedIn

See documentation for content variables: https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/reference/cms/hubl/variables#variables-available-in-all-templates