I have built a news site in Sharepoint. It pretty basic. I have a news article content type and a page layout that has the type of info you would expect on a news article. Im curious about the date an article goes live. I then have a webpart that displays a list of the news articles sorted by a date.

I can make use of Created, Modified or Scheduled Start Date. The created date works until you have a page that is created on a day but not published(approved) until say, 4 days later. Then the date displayed and used to sort wont be correct.

The modified date would take care of this, but if someone needs to edit an article it will push the item higher up the list as the modified date will be changed.

The scheduled start date sounds ideal, but if a page is set to publish immediately then this column is blank so cant be used for sorting.

I just wondered if anyone had any thoughts on this?