Changing The Post Date

When you write posts in your blog, generally you'll want them to show the date / time when they were written.

A blog is a journal, and sometimes you will want to insert posts with a different date.

• You may want a post to show a future date, to bring it to the top of the blog.
• You may want a post to show a past date, to reflect a past experience. Or maybe you want to make a new post, and keep it off the main page, as a separate section of the blog.
• Maybe you want all of the posts to be in forward chronological order, instead of (normal) reverse chronological order.

The default date / time, for any new post, is today / now.

You can change the date / time of any post, any time it suits you. You'll do this by editing each post, one at a time, from the "Posts" menu, which will put you into the Post Editor.

Note that if you want a single post, pinned to the top of the main page, you can add a Featured Post, installed using the dashboard Layout page.

A published post must be reverted to Draft status.

To change the date when editing any post, first revert the post to Draft status.

Use the post editor "Published on" wizard, to change a Draft post publish date.

With the post in Draft status, look for the "Post settings" menu in the post editor display. Below "Post settings", click on the "Published on" entry, then (if necessary) "Set date and time". That will give you a GUI control, where you enter / select the appropriate date and time - then hit "Done".

With the publish date changed, re publish the post.

Then, just Publish Post - or Update. When you hit Publish Post or Update, your post will be re published, with the new date.

If you give the post a posting date in the future, it will be scheduled for future posting - or it will post now, and it will be displayed above any posts with an previous date - depending upon whether you Publish the post after, or before, changing the post date.

If you want to continually post, with each newer post appearing below the previous post, just successively back date each post. Keep track of the post date for each previous post, and make the next post one day (one hour, one minute) earlier.

If the post URL changes, use a custom redirect to let the old URL work.

If you change the date of any post, when it's published, so it falls into a different month and / or year, the URL of the post will change. This will give you a post with a new URL - and old broken links to the post.

If you change the post date, you should add a custom redirect, from the old URL to the new URL. This will let your readers - and the search engines - continue to access the post using the new date, under the new URL.