Question

I’m creating nodes automatically from xml, and I need to set the creation dates for them. I tried with

<?php 
   ...
   $node->created = $date //<- unix timestamp, $node is my node object
   $node->changed = $other_date; 
   ...
?>

but no luck, it sets the current date.
Any ideas?
Thanks

-edit-

$newNode = (object) NULL;
$newNode->type = 'blog';
$newNode->title = $title;
$newNode->uid = 1;
$newNode->status = 1;
$newNode->comment = 0;
$newNode->moderate = 0;
$newNode->sticky = 0;
$newNode->body['und'][0] = array(
                                'value' => $body,
                                'format' => 'full_html');
$newNode->log      = 'Auto Imported Node';
$newNode->language = LANGUAGE_NONE;

// add fields
$newNode->field_description[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'] = $description;
$newNode->field_byline[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'] = $byline;
$newNode->field_small_image[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'] = $smallimg;
$newNode->field_large_image[LANGUAGE_NONE][0]['value'] = $largeimg;


// save node
$newNode->created = $pd; // i've tried with commenting this line out, too
$newNode->date = $pd;
node_save($newNode);

Answer 1

It should work for $node->created, but $node->changed can’t be set with Drupal API.

If you are using node_submit() function which uses strtotime($node->date) to set $node->created, you need to set $node->date as a string date.

$node->date = $date_string;