Saturday, June 21, 2025: 6:38 AM: This morning I dug into why all my drafts (and even Pending Review posts) were getting the same “published” date when I hit bulk-publish, instead of keeping the date I originally set. It turns out:
- WordPress 6.3 apparently switched bulk and Quick Edit actions over to the REST API, and by default that reset post_date/post_date_gmt to “now.”
- A Trac ticket (#59125) supposedly fixed single-post Quick Edit if you type in a new date, but it didn’t restore the old behavior for bulk actions.
- Core still treats Draft Publish and Pending Publish as “give me the current timestamp,” which is why all your posts line up at the moment you hit Publish.
Rather than wait for core to change, I can bundle a tiny plugin that hooks transition_post_status, grabs each post’s original draft/pending date (from its oldest revision or a saved meta), and writes it back after publishing. Once activated, they say that bulk-publishing no longer stomps on my carefully chosen dates. They say I can even extend that plugin with a settings toggle or a WP-CLI command to retroactively fix past posts should I choose to. But I don’t think I need to go that far on The BriaSpere.
Why do I want to post in bulk instead of posting things one at a time? The Answer is simple. WordPress notifies search engines every time I put a new post on my site. I’ve noted over the years that when I post everything to the internet at once, the search engines are happier than when I do one post at a time.
So, I’ll sit down with Copilot at some point today and put together a small plugin to address this. It won’t be anything fancy. But, like the other light weight plugins we’ve developed together, “It will do the job.”