Copy pages without revisions and metadata like first_published_at

When creating a new page it is often easier to copy an existing page with similar content than starting from scratch. The current behaviour when copying a page has some drawbacks and feels more like cloning a page. Wagtail also copies all revisions and metadata specific to this page, like first_published_at.

For example if you then publish the page and order by first_published_at descending you’ll find the page next to the page it was copied from. Most of the time this is not the expected behaviour (at least from the authors perspective).

Perhaps it would be an idea to make copying of revisions and metadata (to be specified) optional? Or to be backwards compatible opt in to exclude this information?

[lb-]

@gasman good call.

As we already ask if the user wants to publish copied page, how about:

• When Publish copied page is ticked: Set the first_published_at as now.
• When Publish copied page is unticked: Set the first_published_at to null as this is not yet published.

I think it is helpful having the page revision history attached to copies, I also don’t see a reason to remove them.

[lb-]

@timorieber I probably should have done this before I started digging into this one but…

I have just tried to replicate the specific issue you mentioned and I cannot get it to do the same thing.

What version of Wagtail were/are you using that has this issue (with first_published_at and last_published_at being copied from the source page).

I have made copies of some pages in the bakerydemo app and they all update the publish dates accurately on copies. It looks like this was fixed around 1.11 but there are no release notes specific to this issue, some notes about how revision dates work though - http://docs.wagtail.io/en/v1.13.1/releases/1.11.html#other-features