Sitecore's Publishing setting vs. a Custom field

Question

I'm using Sitecore 8.2 - update 2.

Scenario: I like to list all of the articles sorted by a Publish Date.

Which is the best practice/approach?

1. Sitecore's Publishing Setting: Use Sitecore's OOTB Publishing Setting. I can set the from field. In my rendering, I will sort the items based on item.Publishing.PublishDate.

2. Custom Field: Add a field name 'Publish Date' to the template. Set it as a Date field. After mapping the items to an object, in the IEnumerable, use this field as to Sort.

Answer 1

For those scenario's I always use a custom field and the reason is rather simple: if your article gets an update (can be for something stupid like a typo) the ootb publish date will change but you probably don't want that effect in your sorting. Well, that's my experience - they (customers) mostly want the original publish date..

It's a choice between something automated and something manual. Involve the customer/editor in this decision:

• the automated way is less work - although it's not that much work to set "today" in a date field and you could even set it in the standard values
• the manual way gives them more flexibility (also had cases where the publishing date of the article was not the actual publish date they wanted to see.. )

So as I said, in my experience it always turned out in favor of the date field on the template