PublishDate cannot be set until post has been saved

[DorsetDigital]

SilverStripe 4.3.0
Blog 3.2.3

I've come across some very annoying behaviour around the PublishDate when adding new Blog Posts.

• Click 'Add new blog post'
• Add a title, some content, an image
• Click the 'Post Options' tag
• Manually set a publish date on the datepicker field
• Click 'Publish'

At this point the Publish Date field resets itself to the current date / time.

The same issue occurs in both Chrome and Opera (where the native datepicker works).
If you manually enter a date in Firefox, but do not enter a time, it works properly and sets the time to midnight.

Looking at the request, it seems the browsers which don't have a native datepicker are sending an empty value for the field if the time is not explicitly set.

I know that the removal of a datepicker has been discussed in a number of tickets in various places, but from a UI perspective, this is a bit of a regression since we're once again at the mercy of poor datepicker implementation in the browser.

I understand there is reluctance to re-introduce a datepicker library, but would separating the value into a date and time field be an acceptable solution to improve the UX? The underlying field could stay the same, but with a bit of logic to make the interface work.

[JorisDebonnet]

One of my clients also complained about this. I would suggest maximizing UX (native when available, a js solution otherwise?) and then adding a preprocessor on the back-end to interpret the posted value as well as possible (i.e. support multiple formats).

I guess this is a general issue for DateTime fields though, not just for the Blog's PublishDate.