in OJS, the publication date of an article can be set manually and - as I see it - is not updated by OJS when metadata of the articles changes.
In OMP we slightly adapted the edges of the cover images and now the publication dates of all monographs are set to the date of the last image upload and are visible in the catalog. Additionally, I didn’t find any option to manually correct the dates.
Is this deliberately done or/and is there any chance to have a publication date input field on the monograph level in OMP? If not, there should at least be the option to hide the publication date.
Thoughts on whether the following might be related. On OMP 1.2.0.0 we published archived books, older than 2017. We set the ‘Date of first publication’ within the catalog entry (book-level) to the correct year, however when published the front-user sees the date the publication was modified in the catalog list which is xx-xx-2017.
Can that date be either hidden, if so which code string needs to be removed OR is it possible to display the ‘Date of first publication’ on the catalog list.
The '‘Date of first publication’ is correctly displayed when you select the book and visit its page to read the synopsis and download the book.
The date displayed for users on the catalog page is the date when the book is assigned to the catalog. This date unfortunately cannot be changed (except because of that bug that changes the date when the cover image changes), and it is in the DB table published_submissions.
Here is the line in the template, where the date is displayed: https://github.com/pkp/omp/blob/master/templates/frontend/objects/monograph_summary.tpl#L29
The ‘Date of first publication’ is associated with a publication format i.e. each publication format can have that date different. Here is the place in template where this date is displayed:
and
Thus, I think it is easier to remove the date from the catalog page than to use the ‘Date of first publication’ on that page.