Allow the "date" of a journal entry to be editable by the user

[Aaron Wells]

Spun off from Bug 1519732: "Additionally it would be nice if you could edit the date slug for journal entries, as the published date may not be the date you want to show."

I've seen this request come up before for Mahara, and it's worth considering because most dedicated blogging platforms have this feature. Specifically the idea is that, when you're editing or writing your blog entry, along with the description and body there is an editable field for its date. The date you enter here is then used for sorting the blog posts chronologically, and it's also displayed to the users when they view the blog posts.

One use-case for this is offline experiences entered retroactively. For instance, you go on a month-long hiking trip. You write down a daily journal. When you get back, you enter that written journal into your Mahara journal, and you want the dates on the journal entries to match up. (This can be accomplished via the MaharaDroid application, but not everyone is able to use that.)

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

One tricky thing to consider here, though, is that Mahara is specifically designed for academic usage, and as such, assessment and record-keeping are part of the equation. So, for instance, if a student was supposed to have been writing weekly blog posts, the teacher needs to be able to see the *real* date the blog posts were created. (This is, for instance, also the reason why we show a permanent record of where deleted comments were, and their creation and edit dates.)

So in all, there are several "dates" associated with a Mahara blog entry:

1. Creation date
2. Publication date (i.e. when it went from "Draft" to "Published")
3. Last edit date
4. Previous history of edit dates (not currently retained)
5. And now this hypothetical editable user date. Let's call it the "display date", like the user "display name".

If we did add an editable display date, I think the best approach would be:

1. The display date is displayed when we're showing a summary of the blog entry, and it's used for the "recent journal entries" block, and other places sorting blog posts by date.

2. When you view a blog entry's artefact detail page, then we display the additional data: Date created, date published, last edit date. Possibly down at the bottom, or hidden under an expandable link.

[Domi Sinclair (domi-sinclair)]

That sounds like a good idea to me!

Making it so that the user can change the date displayed but that the 'real' dates can still be accessed if required for assessment purposes.

It balances creativity and academic usage.

I can foresee some lovely potential utilizations of this, with students setting the display date to be way in the past and pretend to blog as historical figures, but the tutor being able to go in and see the 'real dates' to check they did actually do the work when they were supposed to.

Best wishes,

Domi