Backdating publish dates of topics and articles

Thanks for sharing this idea and your use case @DannyPancratz!

Just curious - how much content have you migrated to the knowledge base/product updates? Was this done via our API or manually?

@daniel.boon We’re still in early stages of our company/community (first 6 months), so it was about 30 articles that I moved over manually. 

But our sister company is 30 years old and produces a high volume of content each year (500+ articles, webinars, white papers, etc). So for an established community like that to move on to the platform, it’d be a big barrier to entry or heavy lift to try to get Knowledge Base content uploaded and organized. If it’s possible to do via API, that’s great. But the backdating would still be something desired for context on the content. 

Update on this: if built, I would hope the functionality would also be applied to Product Updates. 

We’ve moved away from the KB in favor of using the PU module. 

100% this. We currently have our news and updates as a forum category. In order to move them to Product Updates, the dates will make no sense whatsoever given that some of these things happened last year. Please make it possible to change the date on Product Updates (at the very least). Articles would be nice, too. 

@nicksimard from a previous community i worked with, there may be a way for you to convert articles to product updates. You might have to ask your CSM/insided to enable it for you, as I think it’s hidden by default. 

After about a month of using the KB, we decided Product Updates was a better fit and we moved ~30 articles into Product Updates. I think we were able to convert those and they kept the original date/timestamps. But I could be misremembering something from a six months back. 

That said, I appreciate your support of this idea. :) 

Something else that would be handy (not sure if it’s even possible) is to convert other topic types into Product Updates. That way, if they’d previously been created as articles or conversations, you could simply convert them to updates. I don’t see the option in the API or in inSided directly.

I really don’t want to…

a) create 82 updates in the Product Updates module that will have the complete wrong date.
OR

b) create *new* updates in the Product Updates module and *also* retain the forum category that currently houses updates.

So I’m kinda stuck with no great options aside from continuing to do things the way we have been. I’d much prefer to explore the Product Updates module.

@DannyPancratz Ohhh..that would be awesome, if we could do that :) Thanks for the info!

Hi @nicksimard! It is possible to convert an article into a product update and it will keep the same publish date. This functionality is available on the article moderation page, top right corner, under the ‘More option’ dropdown:

Together with the conversion options from other content types into articles, with a few steps, you should be able to convert any topic into a product update.

Please note that you cannot convert the product update back into an article and, currently, there is no bulk action available. 

Hope this helps! 

Hmmm...I’d checked that already. I don’t see the option. Is this something y’all need to enable, or am I missing something? This is what I see, logged in as an admin, looking at an article.

My apologies, @nicksimard! The functionality was not enabled on your instance, it should be available now. 

Ohhhhhh…can’t wait to check that out. Thanks for enabling that :) 

Any progress updates on this? It seems like it shouldn’t (famous last words) be a huge lift to modify publish dates. I’d even take this being available via the API if not from the frontend. 

New use case: We’ve got articles that started out as quite long, with 5 separate tips. We want to break them out into different articles, then have a round-up article that ties them all together. Would be great to create these articles and date them such that the existing article can be changed to that round-up.

The best solution now would be to delete the original entirely and start over, which isn’t great. Or have 5 new articles that have a “round-up” from last year haha.

Hi @nicksimard, thanks for sharing this use case! Being able to update the publish date and/or being able to split a topic are great ideas that enable communities to keep great content fresh and relevant. 

We don’t have short term plans for improvements in this area, as we currently focusing on improving the moderation overviews, but additional moderation tools and capabilities for individual topics will definitely follow. 

Just upvoted this idea. We have just launched our Community on InSided and want to be able to publish Product Updates from the last few months to populate this module. Our Product and Product Marketing teams will own this space of our Community and were surprised to find out that this functionality wasn’t in place. Thanks for the consideration!