How to change published date of a modern page / clientsidepage in SharePoint Online?

Question

we are trying to migrate classic pages to modern and it's a must to maintain the initial publishing date of the page. This date should be visible in the page header:

Digging around we found that there is "FirstPublishedDate" field which is read-only but it's possible to change the value as you can see in the image:

However, changing this field does not affect the displayed date in the header of the page.

So, I have two related questions:

1. Where is the date of the page header stored?
2. How could we change it?

Additional info:

• We are using PnP-PowerShell to update the fields.
• Also I found this post from user voice which is very disapointing to me.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This solution works on the Created (Created_x0020_Date) column in Modern SharePoint.

I'm using the PowerShell module in VS Code with PnP-PowerShell added from the command line - this is the easiest way I've found of doing it on a Mac.

First, connecting to the site:

$siteURL = "https://whatever.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename/"
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $siteURL -Interactive   

Set some variables to keep things clean and make the code more repeatable.

Use the page filename without the .aspx part, so article-from-1972.aspx becomes article-from-1972. For the date format, I'm using yyyy-mm-dd for clarity.

$pageTitle = "Page-name-without-aspx"
$newDate = "2022-01-31 00:00"  

Then three lines to get the page according to the title, set its date, and then republish.

$page = Get-PnPPage -Id $pageTitle 
Set-PnPListItem -Identity $page.PageId -List "Site Pages" -Values @{"Created"=$newDate}
$page.publish()

Hope this is of use to someone