Feature request - new CMS: Allow past dates when scheduling a content

Product Ideas
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1

In the old CMS, setting a past publication date for content was standard functionality—when this behavior broke on a previous patch level, it was treated and resolved as a defect:
LPD-56362.

The Publication Date is the core field driving chronological sorting in listings, archive widgets, search filters, and the date displayed to end users. Restricting this field creates significant operational challenges across common business scenarios:

  • Historical Content Migration: When migrating historical articles, press releases, or documentation from legacy systems, preserving the original publication date is essential so archive timelines remain intact rather than flooding new feeds with old content.

  • Legal & Compliance Requirements: Formal disclosures, policy updates, and financial statements must accurately reflect their official effective/release dates, even if uploaded to the CMS retroactively.

  • Retroactive Publishing: Editors often need to backdate material originally released offline, in print, or distributed across external channels prior to CMS entry.

  • SEO & Metadata Integrity: Structured metadata and search crawlers rely on accurate publication dates for proper indexing and content freshness evaluation.

  • Preserving Out-of-the-Box Functionality: Using custom date fields introduces data redundancy, increases editor friction, and forces teams to build custom sorting/filtering solutions instead of leveraging standard OOTB display widgets.

Given these core requirements, allowing past dates on the Publication Date field is critical for standard editorial and architectural workflows.

2

Hey @Ludovic, thanks for opening the thread. This scenario is already covered, in the import process, this content behave as other objects, that already supports the publication date in the past. What is the process you are trying to follow to import these entries?

The idea there is similar to author, where we allow you to bring the original author when importing, but not allowed to change in the UI, same for publication date. As publication date has less importance on governance than author, we can allow to add a past date, but for your scenario this should already be solved, can you confirm?