Keep post's draft date after publishing?

Question

I let users add posts in draft status. After I check and see that everything is ok, I publish them. I noticed that drafts created two days ago change date after being published. Is there any way of keeping that original date?

Answer 1

you need to manually set the publish date.

Answer 2

The code below probably needs some adjusting, but the trick here is to obtain the date of the first revision and apply it to the post being published:

add_action(  'transition_post_status',  function ( $new_status, $old_status, $post )
{
  if ( $old_status == 'pending'  &&  $new_status == 'publish' 
       && $post->post_date_gmt == $post->post_modified_gmt) {
    $revisions = wp_get_post_revisions($post->ID);
    $oldest = NULL;
    foreach($revisions as $revision){
      $oldest = $revision->ID;
    };
    $previousdate = get_the_date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $oldest );
    wp_update_post(
      array (
        'ID'            => $post->ID,
        'post_date'     => $previousdate,
        'post_date_gmt' => get_gmt_from_date( $previousdate )
      )
    );
  }

}, 10, 3 );