Cannot update date when updating status to 'publish'

[adekbadek]

Bug Report

• Yes, I reviewed the contribution guidelines.
• Yes, more specifically, I reviewed the guidelines on how to write clear bug reports.

Describe the current, buggy behavior

When setting a post's status to 'publish', while also setting a date, the passed date is ignored and the current date is set.

Describe how other contributors can replicate this bug

• wp post create --post_title='test'
• wp post update <ID> --post_date='2005-01-24T09:52:00.000Z' --post_status='publish'
• wp post get <ID> --field=post_date 👉 observe the date is current date

Describe what you expect as the correct outcome

I expect the to be able to set the post date while changing post status to 'publish'

Let us know what environment you are running this on

OS:	Linux 4.19.0-12-amd64 wp-cli/wp-cli#1 SMP Debian 4.19.152-1 (2020-10-18) x86_64
Shell:	/bin/bash
PHP binary:	/usr/local/php7.4/bin/php
PHP version:	7.4.14
php.ini used:	/usr/local/php7.4/conf/php.ini
WP-CLI root dir:	phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli
WP-CLI vendor dir:	phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor
WP_CLI phar path:	/srv/htdocs
WP-CLI packages dir:
WP-CLI global config:
WP-CLI project config:
WP-CLI version:	2.4.0

[danielbachhuber]

Thanks for the report, @adekbadek

As it turns out, you're running into some undocumented behavior of wp_update_post(). Specifically, if you're publishing a post and updating its date at the same time, you need to also include --edit_date=1:

wp post update <ID> --post_date='2005-01-24T09:52:00.000Z' --post_status='publish' --edit_date=1

I don't think we should deviate from core behavior in this case. But, we can add a test case to WP-CLI to document the behavior: #428