Dates are wrong, shifted or refused

Symptoms#

• A row is listed under Errors with Publish date: The resolved value must be a valid date. and is skipped.
• A date came out as the wrong day or month (the 2nd of January instead of the 1st of February).
• Every date is a couple of hours earlier or later than in the spreadsheet.
• New posts all carry today's date instead of the date in the file.
• A row that has no date fails to publish at all (see empty cells).

Likely causes#

Confirmed (reproduced in our tests, or read from the connector's code):

1. The cell is not a date: text such as next Tuesday-ish, Q3 2026, TBD or 27/09/2026. A slash puts the month first, so 27/09/2026 has no month 27 and is refused, while 01/02/2026 is quietly read as 2 January.
2. A CSV saved by a program in your regional format. Excel writes dates in a CSV the way your computer shows them. The same file read on another machine can mean something else.
3. A time zone. A date without a zone is read as UTC on WordPress and then shown in the site's own zone, so a site set to Malta time in summer shows 09:00 as 11:00. Joomla reads it in the publishing account's zone, so no shift appears there.
4. The Publish date is not mapped (or mapped to Default). New WordPress posts then get the moment they are published, and updates keep their existing date.

Possible (depends on your site): a plugin that changes dates when a post is saved, or a site whose time zone was changed after the first import.

Step-by-step solution#

1. Find the rows. Open Errors and select a problem to see its rows and Show the row's values. Row numbers are the spreadsheet's own.
2. Use real dates. In Excel and OpenDocument files, give the column a date or date and time format and type real dates: the way a cell is displayed does not matter, only what it stores.
3. Or write them in the safe form in a CSV: 2026-09-27 or 2026-09-27 13:45. Format the column as yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm before you save the CSV.
4. To fix a shift on WordPress, add the site's offset to the cell (2026-09-27 09:00:00+02:00), or enter the times as UTC. The offset belongs to the date: a site on Malta time is +02:00 in summer and +01:00 in winter. A worked example with five articles shows the shift and the correction.
5. If every post has today's date, open the configuration and map Publish date to the column (status, dates and authors).
6. Upload the file again. Rows that were already published and are now correct show as updated (the date changes) or unchanged.

How to verify#

• Open an item in the review: Publish date shows the date as read from your file (before your site applies its zone).
• After publishing, open the post or article on your site and check the date shown there. In WordPress, the posts list shows Published with the date.

If it persists#

• Check what the cell really stores: in Excel, select it and look at the formula bar (a date shows as a date, text shows as text).
• Compare one row with the table in text, numbers and dates.
• If a date is right in the review and wrong on the site only, check the site's time-zone setting (Settings → General in WordPress, the publishing account's zone in Joomla).
• Contact support with one example row and the date you see on the site.