Monday, June 23, 2025: 9:44 PM: Over the past twenty-four hours, I put a great deal of effort into trying to get a plugin to work correctly that would preserve original or set timestamps when bulk publishing posts in WordPress. The goal was to prevent the system from pinging search engines repeatedly, something I was trying to avoid for good reason.
I experimented with a custom plugin I called “Preserve Original Date” that would restore the original draft or post’s pending timestamp unless a manual change had been made. Several revisions of the code were tested. Microsoft Copilot Pro and I attempted logic based on comparing timestamps, then local time offsets, followed by storing and validating against original dates in custom post meta. Finally, a version was built that would remove the meta if a date change was detected, to honor any manual edits made through the bulk editor.
Shock of all shockers? “None of it worked.”
Despite the precision in logic, the reality is that WordPress’s bulk editor seems to bypass or ignore plugin behavior tied to those hooks. Post date handling, when done in bulk, appears to be locked into WordPress core in a way that cannot be reliably overridden. Every test led to the same result: manually set dates through the bulk editor were overwritten, or indistinguishable from WordPress’s automated changes. “It all went down without so much as an error message showing!”
I’m thinking I might disable pinging services in the WordPress Writing settings altogether, removing the automatic “notify search engines” functionality. It’s easy to do as you just clear the URL out of the edit field and hit save.
It’s the cleanest and most reliable solution I can come up with for now. As for the plugin, I’ve got one more thing to try and then I’m letting it go if it fails again. There’s no use maintaining something that fights against WordPress’s core logic.
The frustration is valid, but the effort wasn’t wasted. I now understand how WordPress handles bulk updates, and where the limitations lie with the platform, me having been using WordPress since 2011.
For my part, I’ll continue manually setting times if I want to back date posts and simply keep publishing them one at a time. “Google will just have to learn to love me!”
Of course, my final test just might work but the truth is, I’m not holding my breath. Stack Exchange and many other forums of its kind have a lot of code that is supposed to solve problems. But I know from long experience that finding someone who actually knows what they are talking about beyond creating a band-aid fix that screws with platform functionality in a manner that can be downright risky is like finding a pot of gold on your front step. It could happen, “But it isn’t likely.”
Using Copilot to work on this project has only expedited the research process, as AI can access the web a hell of a lot faster than I can. True, Copilot isn’t always accurate in what it finds and needs to be watched. But I now know after twenty four hours what would have once taken a week or more to discover. “Creating the Preserve Date Plugin was a Highly Educational Dead End.”
I now know for certain that the bulk editing capability I once came to love in WordPress is Dead, it’s date of interment around WordPress Version 6.3 if I’m remembering that right. I now know why the Automatic team killed its original awesome yet resource taxing functionality and certainly understand the reasoning behind the way it’s functioning now. I don’t have to like it, “But it is done.”
Sure, I could keep pressing onward in my efforts to force the platform to function in a way that it wasn’t designed to. To what end though? I mean, if most of us were the great programmers and web developers we’d like to think we are, companies like Automatic, Facebook, Microsoft and so many others would be out of business because we wouldn’t need them. And yet, here we are, sometimes doing stuff to tweak their handy work. “Go figure!”