# The date on a page

> Every page has a publication date. On most it does not matter; on anything that appears in a list it decides the order, and backdating is how you fix that.
>
> From the MightyBuilder documentation: https://docs.mightybuilder.ai/pages/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](/dynamic/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 If you want something genuinely unpublished, leave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.