The Zen theme includes a very nice CSS feature that puts a background image on nodes and comments that are unpublished. This makes it very clear, visually, that something is unpublished. This patch replicates the behavior for Drupal by adding the css to node.css and comment.css, and moving the UNPUBLISHED image into /misc. It will be argued that the UNPUBLISHED image cannot be translated, and this is true, but the image can be overridden in the theme with 2 rules of css:

.node-unpublished, .comment-unpublished {
  background-image:url(./unpublished-translated.png);
}

Here is a screenshot of an unpublished node and comment. Notice how clear it is to recognize that they are unpublished.

Example of unpublished node and comment

CommentFileSizeAuthor
unpublished-example.jpg110.63 KBrobertdouglass
unpublished.png1.39 KBrobertdouglass
unpublished.patch1.11 KBrobertdouglass

Comments

mcjim’s picture

mcjim commented

While this does look nice, would it be better to add "UNPUBLISHED" to the line with the date/author, thus making it translatable?

pancho’s picture

pancho
Location UTC+2 🇪🇺 EU
commented
Status: Needs review » Needs work

McJim: Yes, I would agree that this is better. I also think this is a major improvement of existing functionality that should be done in D6.

sutharsan’s picture

sutharsan commented
Component: comment.module » usability

Moving all usability issues to Drupal - component usability.

kika’s picture

kika commented

Watermarks are nice but they are also translation hell. I'd like to wontfix this. Ok?

yoroy’s picture

yoroy commented

Zen theme does this with CSS only now:

.node-unpublished div.unpublished, /* The word "Unpublished" displayed beneath the content. */
.comment-unpublished div.unpublished {
  height: 0;
  overflow: visible;
  color: #d8d8d8;
  font-size: 75px;
  line-height: 1;
  font-family: Impact, "Arial Narrow", Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-weight: bold;
  text-transform: uppercase;
  text-align: center;
  word-wrap: break-word; /* A very nice CSS3 property */
}

It _is_ helpful but still not directly translatable. Thoughts?

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Component: usability » ajax system

If you do this the proper way would be a way that screenreaders can read this as well. So I would vote for plain text, optionally styled. At the very least the image should contain an alt tag.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Not sure why it changed the 'component' to Ajax. Cannot find 'usability' in the list at present.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Component: ajax system » base system
Issue tags: +Usability

Changing to 'base system' for now... Or should it be 'markup'?

Tagging with 'usability' in the issue tags for now.

yoroy’s picture

yoroy commented
Status: Needs work » Closed (won't fix)

Communicating Unpublished status for content definately needs work but we should refrain from solving that with images.