How to prevent admin role from changing “Updated date” of content

Question

The updated date of the content is displayed on each node with this code in template file.

<?php print strftime( "%Y-%m-%d", $node->changed) ?>

Now when I save the content with admin role the date displayed is the date I updated (of course). But I only want to display the date updated by the author of the content. So how can I prevent admin role from changing "updated date" and only keep the date updated by the content author? Or is there a way to display only the updated date by the author of content?

Answer 1

Like Clive mentioned there is no good/easy way to prevent the node change timestamp from being updated, but as a possible alternative you could use node creation time instead:

function mymodule_nodeapi(&$node, $op, $a3 = NULL, $a4 = NULL) {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'presave':
      global $user;
      if ($node->type == 'mynodetype' && !in_array('administrator', $user->roles)) {
        $node->created = time();
      }
      break;
  }
}

This implementation of hook_nodeapi() would set the 'mynodetype' node creation time to the current time when a non-administrator saves it. You'll have to keep in mind that users can manually set the creation time when editing nodes and this will override it for non-administrators. It will also mean that in those cases the actual node creation time will be lost even if the user isn't modifying it.

Answer 2

You can't really, it's hard coded into the node_save() function with this bit of code:

$time = time();
if (empty($node->created)) {
  $node->created = $time;
}

// The changed timestamp is always updated for bookkeeping purposes (revisions, searching, ...)
$node->changed = $time;

Short of implementing your own node form which bypasses node_save() there's not really much you can do (except hacking the core node.module file which is never advised).

Answer 3

<?php if (($logged_in)&&($user->uid != "1")): ?>
<?php print $submitted; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Answer 4

In order to prevent changes to nodes by administrators from updating the changed date, you can make a module with the following code. The way this works is when an administrator saves a node, the new changed date is replaced with the old changed date.

<?php

/**
 * Implements hook_node_presave().
 * @param $node
 */
function YOURMODULE_node_presave($node) {
  global $user;
  if (in_array('administrator', $user->roles)) {
    $node->changed = $node->original->changed;
  }
}

The above code will prevent the date from updating on all node types. If you only want this to apply to specific node types, try something like the code below. You might want to extract the $types array into a module configuration form.

<?php

/**
 * Implements hook_node_presave().
 * @param $node
 *
 * Add node types to $types array to freeze their changed date.
 */
function YOURMODULE_node_presave($node) {
  $types = array(
    'your_node_type',
    'node_type_2'
  );
  if (in_array($node->type, $types)) {
    $node->changed = $node->original->changed;
  }
}