Publication date 01/01/1970 is refused

[emmanuel78]

I want to publish an artical refering to a real book.
Then the publication date is set with to book one and not the article publication date.

Defect => the jan-01-1970 is refused by WordPress.
Instead of, I set jan-02-1970

[sabernhardt]

trying to publish at midnight (U.S. Central) January 1, 1970

[sabernhardt]

Hi and welcome to WordPress Core Trac!

I received a REST API error message when I tried to save a post in the (block) editor with a publish date of 01/01/1970 at midnight local time. If it compares against the Unix epoch time with a less than or greater than operator, that may need to account for equality too (<=).

For workarounds:

• I was able to set the publish date to 12:01am in the editor.
• Quick Edit allows setting the time to 00:00.

This fixes handling of dates representing the Unix epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z).

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60184

[siliconforks]

Here is an easy way to reproduce this issue using only the command line:

curl \
  -X POST WORDPRESS_URL/wp-json/wp/v2/posts \
  -u 'USERNAME:APPLICATION_PASSWORD' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8' \
  -d '{"title":"Post created via REST API","date_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00Z"}'

Change:

• WORDPRESS_URL to the URL of your WordPress installation
• USERNAME to your WordPress admin username (or at least some user with the capability of creating posts)
• APPLICATION_PASSWORD to an application password for that user

[peterwilsoncc]

As the bug is in the REST API's code, I've updated to component to ensure the issue is seen by the correct component maintainers.

[drjosh07]

Test Report

Environment

• Server: Apache (Linux)
• WordPress: 6.7-alpha-58576-src
• Browser: Chrome 128.0.6613.138
• OS: Mac
• Theme: Twenty Twenty-Four
• Plugins: None activated

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a new post
2. Set the publish date to be January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 a.m.
3. Attempt to publish the post.
4. A red banner will appear stating that "Updating failed. Invalid parameter(s): date"
5. Confirmed seeing the issue when the error was reported.

Results

• Issue reproduced. ✅
• Confirmed post create at January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 a.m. was successful.

Applied PR from GitHub.

[antpb]

Reviewed this patch during contributor day for commit, marking commit! Hi @kadamwhite !

[kadamwhite]

In 59040:

REST API: Allow posts to be published with a publication date of midnight 1970-01-01.

Explicitly checks date parsing return values for false, so that 0 (the value returned for the UNIX epoch of 1970-01-01 00:00:00) is correctly treated as a valid timestamp.

It should be valid to create a post dated to any point in history.

Props emmanuel78, sabernhardt, siliconforks, drjosh07, antpb, TimothyBlynJacobs.
Fixes #60184.

Thanks for your contribution! This has been committed in changeset r59040, Git hash 71c69dad2e05fd51c508b1311805083943dc5398