How to display both "Published date" and "Updated date" in Confluence blog posts?

Question

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to improve how dates are displayed in Confluence blog posts.

Currently, when I create and edit blogs, I only see the creation date, not the actual published date (for example, if I draft a blog yesterday and publish it today, it still shows yesterday’s date). I would also like to display the last updated date.

I experimented with automation rules and Rovo agents, and according to the AI suggestions the instruction should look like this:

Edit the blog and add at the top:
"Published date: {{blogpost.dateFirstPublished}}"
"Updated date: {{blogpost.dateLastUpdated}}"

As a trigger, I tried using blog post labeling, since the “publish blog” event doesn’t seem to fire when the blog is updated.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work — I can’t get the automation to actually edit the blog. I tested with the “Social Media Writer” and “Job Listing Assistant” Rovo agents, but no luck so far.

Has anyone managed to achieve something similar, or know if there’s a workaround to display both published and updated dates on Confluence blogs?

Thanks in advance!

Daniel Alomar Claramonte · Answer

Thanks for your answer, but we schedule the majotrity of our publications and this workaround wouldn't work

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Daniel Alomar Claramonte I run into the creation date/published date thing every time I make a Recent Updates page listing updates to the documentation between the last time I published my Scroll Viewport site and the one I'm publishing now.

The way I get around this is to draft my page and publish it. Then, on the day I'm going to publish the documentation, I duplicate that page to create another with the current date and then delete to original page.

Last week, I realized the day after I published that I had missed documenting a couple of updates in the app, so I added those to my Confluence pages. I then did the same process as above—I updated my Recent Updates page with the added changes, added a note at the top about the page being updated since the last version was published 2 days earlier, highlighted my edits, duplicated the page, and added (updated) at the end of the page title.

Since you are updating the blog to republish it, the easiest thing to do is add a line at the top to the effect of Originally published: <date>. If you do multiple updates over time, you can add those dates as well.