There’s an annoying bug in WordPress 5 that’s popped up a few times for me lately and I finally sat down this morning and decided to see if I could figure out what the heck is going on. I found mention of it at the WordPress site, but it’s an eight year old bug that appears to have been fixed at some point. Only it’s not fixed, because this is exactly what’s happening here.
I had a post that I never finished in draft, edited in bulk quick mode to close a bunch of posts to comments and pingbacks, and when I used the unfinished post for my Year in Review—2019 post, it set the date to December 28 when I published it on January 1. I had to update it to the correct post date last night when I realized what had happened. (I posted the December progress post, backdated, and it still showed up before the year in review post that I had posted on January 1st, and I knew that wasn’t right, so a quick check of the post showed me the date was off by 4 days.)
So, in case you’ve found this post while looking for info about a WordPress publish date bug, there you go. Maybe this will help you remember not to quick edit drafts. Better safe than sorry and easier to remember than to remember to check the publish date every time.
Happy New Year. :D
(My test post that confirmed this bug is actually the bug I’m dealing with.)