I have a news listing on my website, which I based on the standard Umbraco templates that were around at the time I first built the site.

News items have a createDate property (the built-in umbraco standard for a document), plus a custom date field called publishDate.

The idea is that if the editor does not specify a publishDate, the document's createDate will be used; otherwise, the publishDate will be preferred.

The code includes the following:

// Find all pages with document type umbNewsItem under this page.
// Then order them, first by publishDate (a property the editor can explicitly set on the news item)
// and then by createDate, which is set by Umbraco automatically when a page gets created.
var newsItems = @CurrentPage.sqdNewsItems.OrderBy("publishDate desc, createDate desc");

This should be fairly standard stuff. When I first created the site, I verified that it all worked OK. I tested with news items with and without publishDates explicitly set.

But today, one of my editors alerted me that news items which did not specify a publishDate; which were otherwise published, (and available on their direct URLs) were not listed in the news listing page at all - and thus un-discoverable.

I recently upgraded to 7.6.1 and I had to change quite a bit of other code on my site to take account of API changes. Has something else changed to make the above invalid?