Maybe it's just me, but it would be really nice if editing Entry Dates was easier.

It makes total sense that the Entry Date for new posts is set to the current system time. But I'm entering a large number of new entries originally created in hand written journals and in Microsoft Word. These all need to be backdated, some as much as several years.

I understand why the date must be formatted as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. But the combined requirements of placing the year first, the 24-hour timestamp, and the inclusion of seconds, makes for a cumbersome, non-intuitive editing process. Again, maybe it's just me, but simply at the visual level, the long string of numbers, dashes, spaces, and colons becomes one blur (even when I'm wearing my glasses!) and I often have to go back to fix something.

I'd love to see a system where, for both new and existing posts, the current Entry Date, in addition to appearing in the existing Entry Date field, also appeared in dropdowns, one for each numeric element of the full date. Each element could then be edited by selecting from its respective dropdown.

Would also be nice if Entry Dates did not require using the 24-hour clock, and could instead somehow parse 'am' and 'pm', even though it would still get translated into 24-hour in the database. Maybe an option in the Weblog Settings, associated with the Time Zone setting, could let users set their preferred entry date format.

i didnt change an entry date that much, but i think what you're saying does make sense.
instead of a single text field to hold the year, month, day, hour, mins, sec, it would be nice if having a dropdown with much more user-friendly options. i think there's nothing to change with mt core, somebody could just tweak the interface for that section. i never try to disturb the system template, but i think it's possible, right!

any mt develoepr have spare time to do this?

Someone's working on a plugin that by description will provide a sort of calendar pop-up to set entry dates. That's all I can really say right now, as it was just an initial announcement. I've sent him a link to this post, and we'll see if/when he decides to expand.

Project Athena will include a pop-up Calendar widget for editing all dates within the app. A beta for that project is not too far away.

I knew this feature would be in Project Athena... It just had to be. The other day I just snapped, though, when I tried to schedule a post and forgot to enter a leading "0." So, for the interim, I'm working on the Hot Date plugin. It gives you a calendar to select the date, time drop-downs, and works in 12-hour time. I'll try to release it tonight.

The best part about Dan's 'Hot Date' plugin (which he kindly offered to let me try out and test) is the Update function, which lets you one-click reset an entry to the current time, and easily keep it at the top of the entry list. Very simple, very useful.

Hot Date, more-or-less ready for general consumption. Be sure to cook thoroughly.

I hope this doesn't break the way the import feature works currently (3.35). I load all of the articles for each month's magazine into a FileMaker database, and then export them with MT tags in place -- including the date and time. If I have to -- after importing -- go in and change the date and time on each of my new entries, I'm not going to be a happy camper.