Mergedate not working with biblatex-publist?

Question

I want to add a list of publications to my CV, and I found that the biblatex-publist package offers everything I was looking for.

For conference papers, I used the @misc entry. I want the entries to appear starting with the year, but I want the date to be displayed later in the entry. When using the authoryear bibliography style, I can achieve this with mergedate.

For the publist style, however, this option seems to have no effect, and it begins each entry with the full date. I can use the date=year option to suppress the full date at the beginning of the entry, but it then also omits the full date from the entry later.

Is there a way to achieve an output similar to how mergedate works with authoryear?

MEW:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage[backend=biber, 
  bibstyle=publist, 
  % date=year,
  mergedate=basic, 
  sorting=ydnt]{biblatex}
  
\plauthorname[Firstname][]{Lastname}

\begin{filecontents*}[overwrite]{publist.bib}

@misc{paper2012test,
author = {Lastname, Firstname},
title = {Paper title},
year = {2012},
howpublished = {Paper presented at the meeting of Organization Name, Location},
date = {2012-11-03},
keywords = {paper}
}

\end{filecontents*}

\addbibresource{publist.bib}


\begin{document}

\nocite{*}

\printbibliography[type=misc, heading=subbibliography, title={Conference Papers (selected)}]

\end{document}

Answer 1

By default publist uses authoryear as base style. It therefore 'inherits' the mergedate option. But publist has its own date handling that interferes with what mergedate can do.

Here is a very rudimentary way to get something similar to mergedate to work.

It forces date=year, locally by redefining the macros \printdate and \printdateextra and then do not delete the year for later use if we have a more granular date.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage[backend=biber, 
  bibstyle=publist, 
  mergedate=false,
  sorting=ydnt]{biblatex}
  
\plauthorname[Firstname][]{Lastname}

\makeatletter
\renewbibmacro*{bpl:date:makedate}{%
  \begingroup
  \protected\def\printdate{\csuse{mkdaterangeyear}{}}%
  \protected\def\printdateextra{\csuse{mkdaterangeyearextra}{}}%
    \printtext{%
        \iffieldundef{year}{%
            \iffieldundef{pubstate}%
                {}
                {%
                 \printfield{pubstate}%
                 \if@pubstateextra
                   \printfield{extradate}%
                 \fi%
                }%
        }{%
           \iffieldundef{month}%
                {\printdateextra}%
                {\printdate}%
        }%
    }%
  \endgroup
}

\renewbibmacro*{bpl:year+labelyear}{%
    \iffieldundef{year}{%
        \iffieldundef{pubstate}%
            {\let\bbx@lasthash\undefined}%
            {%
             \usebibmacro{bpl:date:labeldate+extradate}%
             \savefield{pubstate}{\bbx@lasthash}%
             \clearfield{pubstate}%
            }%
    }{%
         \usebibmacro{bpl:date:labeldate+extradate}%
         \savefield{year}{\bbx@lasthash}%
         \iffieldundef{month}
           {\clearfield{year}}
           {}%
    }%
}
\makeatother

\begin{filecontents*}[overwrite]{\jobname.bib}
@misc{paper2012test,
  author = {Lastname, Firstname},
  title = {Paper title},
  year = {2012},
  howpublished = {Paper presented at the meeting of Organization Name, Location},
  date = {2012-11-03},
  keywords = {paper},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}


\begin{document}
\nocite{*}

\printbibliography
\end{document}