Is there a way to manually disable updating the timestamp on a special occasion? (eg: updating the entry to revise a blog post, but not to re-date it)
Sounds like you need to configure the default constraint so that it populates the column on insertion only:
DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
Changing it to only be this means that any revisions will not trigger the timestamp value to be updated. IE: If you created the blogpost yesterday, and corrected a typo today - the date in the column would still be for yesterday.
ALTER TABLE myTable
CHANGE myTimestampColumn
myTimestampColumn TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;
To make it not auto-update:
ALTER TABLE myTable
CHANGE myTimestampColumn
myTimestampColumn TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;
NOTE: The "default current_timestamp" part just sets it to the current stamp at default time, since the field is not-null. You can remove both the not null and the default, if you like.
If you do change timestemp on update then you have to take into your consideration that if the value was updated but not changed (updated the save value) then it will not update the "on update Current_timestemp" and on this situation you should set the timestemp manually