“Draft” is one of eight post statuses available in WordPress. A post in the Draft status is not published and is not visible to the public.
Draft is often confused with the “Pending Review” status. However, these two statuses have different meanings:
Here at PublishPress, our focus is on creating publishing workflows in WordPress. This includes allowing you to create custom statuses in WordPress.
However, before moving on to more advanced workflows, people often need some clarity on the basic workflow features in WordPress.
For example, what exactly is the difference between “Pending Review” and “Draft”?
This week we talked with a PublishPress customer who wanted to build an approval process for his website. His goal is to allow administrators to assign empty posts to authors, who can then add the content and pass them back to the administrator for approval. Here are the four steps in that workflow:
In this guide, we'll explain how to set up this workflow on your WordPress site.
By default, WordPress users in the admin area can see all the Posts on the site, regardless of whether they are the author.
This is not a problem for many sites. After all, most Posts on most sites are publicly available – there's no need to hide them.
However, in some situations, site owners don't want authors to see the Posts that other users are working on. For example, one PublishPress customer wanted to create a private inbox for WordPress users.
Many of us spend a lot of time working on our content. We spend hours making sure the spelling, grammar, punctuation are as good as possible.
So we are worried about losing content. What happens if my browser crashes? What happens if someone edits my post and makes a mistake?
Fortunately, WordPress has the solution: Revisions.
By default, WordPress does not allow you to see a list of your own draft posts.
This can be frustrating if you want to see your work in progress.
The image below shows the filters on top of the “Posts” screen in WordPress. As you can see, there are a lot of available filters. However, you can't use more than one of the top row of filters. You can either click “Mine” or you can click “Draft” … you can't choose both at the same time.
We do our best to write a lot of documentation for PublishPress.
However, many of you find it easier to follow video tutorials. So we've started posting videos on the PublishPress YouTube channel.
There will be 2 new videos every week about PublishPress. We'll also cover related topics such as WordPress content workflows and user permissions.
PublishPress provides 3 dashboard widgets: Unpublished Content, Notepad, and Posts I'm following. These widgets appear on the main Dashboard screen in your WordPress admin area.
If you don't need these widgets, follow our guide to disabling dashboard widgets in WordPress.
The Unpublished Content widget gives an overview of the content that is in each custom status. Currently, this widget does only show posts, not other post types.
If you click on any of the links in this widget, you'll be taken to the main Posts page, and show only post with that status. Here is an example using the Draft status:
The Notepad widget is very simple. It's a text box where you can store notes for yourself:
The Posts's I'm Following widget shows any posts that you have followed, inside PublishPress. You can follow posts via the Calendar screen or the Content Overview screen.
You can disable any or all of these widgets via the “General” tab of the PublishPress settings:
