Updating wordpress posts without updating

Dear web (I’m not going to insult you and call you lazy like some people I’d mention),

Why is it that even if I’m just adding a tag to a wordpress post it deems it necessary to update the date of the post causing places like planet to republish the post? Surely there must be some way around this that I’m missing?

10 thoughts on “Updating wordpress posts without updating”

  1. I tend to think this is a bug in WordPress, in that performing certain operations (in my case, it was forcing my post to send trackbacks to another blog after the fact because pingbacks hadn’t worked) that aren’t “updates” shouldn’t be setting the “updated” element on the post/feed.

    Apparently the Atom spec disagrees, or so I was told in bmo.

  2. That’s interesting, because I’m pretty sure planet is pulling the RSS version of my feed, though that was due to an accident on my part.

  3. I have run into this annoyance multiple times. It’s really, really obnoxious. Like clouserw, I’ve resorted to updating the database.

    The ‘updated’ feature sounds good in practice, but when applied to post metadata (like tags) which you may change later without changing the post’s content the result is just silly.

    One could argue that all feed readers are broken and should notice only tags changed as opposed to the content, but given no one does this it’s a moot point.

  4. I hit the same issue with TextPattern – it will always change the “time updated” for a post and there is no way to turn it off (verified in the source code). In itself this is correct behavior I think but Planet looks at the time of last update rather than the time when something was posted and sorts posts accordingly. My “solution” was an SQL query that resets “time updated” to “time posted” for all posts.

  5. Yup, just adding a tag, fixing a typo, reorganising your categories, fixing a broken link, and many more. Ultimately it needs to be your decision as the author as to whether the change you’re making is something the world needs to know about or not.

    As noted above, use my plugin which was created for precisely this reason. You’ll be able to just install it when you’re running 2.7, but it will work happily with 2.6 if you don’t mind making a couple of tiny mods to your WordPress source.

Comments are closed.