The date on a page

Every page and every article has a publication date. On most pages it does not matter. On anything that appears in a list — which is every article — it decides the order.

Where it is

On the Settings tab of the page or article, in the column on the right.

Leave it empty and it looks after itself: an empty date means “the day this was first published”, which is right for almost everything. You set it only to say something different — see Backdating below. Under it, the same column shows when the record was created, last edited and first published — facts about what happened, rather than anything you choose.

When it matters

The moment a page appears in a list built from your other pages — a blog index, a news strip, “more like this”. Those lists are usually sorted newest first, and date is what “newest” means.

Why it is not “when it changed”

Because fixing a typo should not move a two-year-old article back to the top of your blog. The date you set stays put; a separate value tracks when the page last changed, and that one updates by itself.

Both are available to a list — see Dates for using either.

Two on the same day

The date carries an optional time, and that is what it is for. Two articles published on one day otherwise share a date exactly, and a newest-first list has nothing to order them by — so which one comes out on top is arbitrary.

The time is read in your site’s own timezone, the one on Settings. That is also why it is stored as a date and a time rather than as an exact moment: change the site’s timezone and every date moves with it, instead of a stored moment quietly being an hour — or, near midnight, a day — out.

Backdating

Set it to the real publication date when you are bringing an article across from somewhere else, so your index reads in the order things actually happened rather than the order you typed them in.

A date in the future

Publishes like anything else. It does not hide the page — it just sorts to the top of a newest-first list. If you want something genuinely unpublished, leave it as a draft or disable it.

No date at all

A page that never had one sorts as though it were empty, which puts it at one end of a list. If an index looks oddly ordered, a page with a missing date is the first thing to check.