How best to back-date entries in Contentful

I’m wondering what the recommended way to set the publish date to a date in the past is within the Contentful GUI.

Our clients have migrated all their blog content to Contentful, and I had intended to use the default publish date and updated date values to power each Blog Post’s date, so there were no additional fields that need to be manually set by the author, and it would “just work” with Contentful’s great schedule-ahead publishing features.

However, these posts need to be back-dated to when they were originally published on the old version of their site, and from the looks of it there is no way to set the publications values to a date in the past. Do I have to ask my client to fill out a separate special Publish Date field on the content model if I want them to be able to set publish dates in the past?

Hi @frank1

It’s my understanding that the dates in then entry’s sys object are always auto-generated and there is no way to set them manually. In such cases where I’ve migrated old content from another platform to Contentful, I have created a Publish Date field as you suggested.

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Alright, thank you @teemu.tammela1 !