Simple blog entry question

[PhotoWebMax]

One of the PW project sites I am working on needs a simple blog (just paginated articles really)...

Part of what I am doing is reworking an existing MODx Revo site that has Articles installed. Articles is a full blogging tool that operates as a standalone system. I have reworked it into this site and changed all the default CSS that came with Articles to match the overall base site design, structure and navigation. 

Like the PW Blog profile Articles comes with a ton of features. As the site owner is not adding that much content to the system I think we need to strip away many of the blog extras. I am going to to attempt to build a simple system using fields and basic statements.

Now to the question(s):

Create Date: the current system is displaying the article post creation date dynamically. We need to transfer all the existing MODx articles posts to the PW blog system. After thinking about the heavy lifting this would require I have decided just to manually copy the posts one by one into the PW blog page once the site is live.

What to do about the post creation dates though? 

* Is there a fancy way of adding these posts to the PW blog page that keeps the actual articles creation dates in tact? 

* I could keep this simple and just create an empty Create Date Field to my template. But would be there be a way of adding the date automatically/dynamically once the old MODx article archive has been posted to the PW blog page?  In other words: all the old posts would have the creation dates entered manually but from then on new PW posts would have the dates presented automatically? 

It would not be a deal breaker if we had to enter the creation dates manually forever in the PW system. This is just one of those forks in the road issues I need to consider...

Thanks!

[diogo]

I have read this very quickly and also have to answer quickly. For what I understand what you want is "manual creation date" if exists OR real creation date if not:

echo $page->get("manual_field|created");

[thistimj]

I am in the process of manually porting a number of WP posts into a new ProcessWire site. I've created a "date_published" field, and I'm inputting the old published dates by hand. However, there is an option on the datetime field type that will allow new entries to default to the current day's date. You'd have to look through the settings as I can't remember offhand what tab it's under. So part of my process is manual, but for future posts, it will be more automated.

[PhotoWebMax]

Thanks! Looks promising...

In this case what I want is a simple system for posting articles with authorName, postDate, postTitle and postCopy; with a preset pagination system and maybe something like adding links to the five most recent articles posts in the sidebar. Don't need feeds, tags, categories, etc...