Draft's Last Modified date incorrect if it is Scheduled

[lastnode]

Once a Draft is Scheduled, the date of it its most recent revision is not shown under the Date column at Posts > All Posts.

Instead, the Draft's scheduled publication date is shown in the Date column, alongside the label 'Last Modified'.

Steps to recreate:
1) Create and save a Draft
2) Set a scheduled publication date and time for the Draft
3) Save the Draft
4) Check the 'Date' column at Posts > All Posts

If you schedule a Draft for the future, for example, a Last Modified date from the future is shown under Date.

[valendesigns]

I feel like I've seen this issue before in Trac, but I can't find the ticket. Anyone else experiencing déjà vu?

Also, this seems like one of those issues that is based on opinion and could go either way. An argument for why it should show the actual last time you made changes and why it should show the future date for a scheduled post both have merit. If I had to venture a guess though, it's likely the way it is by design.

[lastnode]

A patch that uses $post->post_modified for Drafts instead of $post->post_date.

[lastnode]

Sorry, I think my ticket could have been clearer. Hopefully this screenshot will show you exactly what I mean -

​https://cloudup.com/co-gRsi8KsX

I may be way off base here, but a Post being able to have a 'Last Modified' date in the future seems somewhat counter-intuitive to me.

Should we show the scheduled Publish date even though the user hasn't yet hit Schedule?

And even if we do that, should the text there then say 'Last Modified'?

I think my above patch fixes this issue, but any feedback is welcome. :) Thank you!

[yoavf]

Totally makes sense to me - last modified shouldn't be a future date for drafts. I've just cleaned up the patch as per the php coding standards in 32386.diff​

[obenland]

Looking at the entire code for the date output, we should probably select our times based on the post status.

The provided patch also only fixes it for the list mode, in excerpt mode that code is not even used.

[obenland]

Some history: [6856], [9110]

[SergeyBiryukov]

While we're at it, let's also replace $t_time, $m_time, etc. with more descriptive names.

[lastnode]

This bug should be fixed in excerpt mode as well now. Also made sure that Drafts are run through 'human_time_diff' as well.

[lastnode]

Thanks for taking a look at this, Yoav and Konstantin!

Attempted to fix the time in excerpt mode in 32386.2.diff​. Not sure if this was the most elegant way to do it, though! :)

Also fixed times for Drafts not being run through human_time_diff().

Tried to make the variable names a little more meaningful as well, but left $h_time and $t_time alone, as I'm not sure if those are used elsewhere and should remain the same.

[lastnode]

Cleaned up code and fixed trailing spaces. Thank you for the pointers, Yoav!

[obenland]

32386.3.diff​ looks worse than it actually is. It just uses modified time functions for drafts, cleans up some logic, and uses saner variable names. With this we also get relative times back for drafts.

[afercia]

Please consider with the patch applied the whole idea of "sort by Date column" gets a bit confusing. When you click on the Date column header, you're still getting an order by post_date while the column will show dates that are not ordered, because we're showing different data type in the same column.

[SergeyBiryukov]

32386.3.diff​ looks clean. The only thing I noticed is that __( 'Unpublished' ) is no longer passed to the 'post_date_column_time' filter, seems like a potential back compat issue.

Not sure how to address comment:12 yet.

[obenland]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

Not sure how to address comment:12 yet.

Me neither. I have a hard time re-creating it.
@afercia, can you go through the steps you took to get there?

[afercia]

Replying to obenland:

can you go through the steps you took to get there?

The "Sticky draft" post in the screenshot above is a post that was previously "published" in date 2015/01/17 then I've changed its status in "pending" and saved as pending. It's still ordered by the "2015/01/17" date but the Date column it's showing its last modified date.

[helen]

I hate potentially rabbitholing tickets by asking us to pull back, but I think this warrants it. There is clearly a bug here, in that this is a subpar and rather inaccurate column of data. What data should this column contain and in what situation?

If we operate off the premise that data displayed in the list table is to help users make decisions about what to do next (is this the draft I'm looking for, do I need to delete this thing that is past its prime), I don't think the date column is doing a great job. I have no idea what happens when you go to publish a draft post with a date you've set in the past. I'd even love to know when a published/scheduled post was last modified. And why does a private post show last modified even though it appears on the front-end with its original post date? Is potentially two dates too much to have in that column?

We can fix the draft modified date itself on its own, as the date sort thing is really already a problem once we're in this situation. I just don't think it's our only problem here.

[obenland]

I don't think we'll come to a conclusion on this in what's left in 4.3.

[swissspidy]

#43014 was marked as a duplicate.

[SergeyBiryukov]

#51384 was marked as a duplicate.

[christopherdarling]

Noticed this today on 5.5.1 and surprised to see it backdates 5 years. This also occurs for me when leaving the Scheduled date as 'Immediately', any subsequent changes to the draft post show the original datetime of when the post was first saved. Incase it helps anyone, I've used the following filter to solve the issue for me.

add_filter( 'post_date_column_time', function ($t_time, $post, $column_name, $mode) {
    # If the post type is Draft, use the last modified timestamp
    if ( $post->post_status === 'draft' ) {
        $t_time = sprintf(
            /* translators: 1: Post date, 2: Post time. */
            __( '%1$s at %2$s' ),
            /* translators: Post date format. See https://www.php.net/date */
            get_the_modified_time( __( 'Y/m/d' ), $post ),
            /* translators: Post time format. See https://www.php.net/date */
            get_the_modified_time( __( 'g:i a' ), $post )
        );     
    }
    
    return $t_time;
}, 10, 4 );

[knutsp]

I trashed some unpublished, scheduled posts today, and in Trash the Date column says modified on the (future) publish date, not date trashed.