By wessex on

I am looking for some advice on how best to deal with unpublished content.

As sections of the website are developed (we mainly use the book node type), I would like authenticated users to be able to see and navigate the content as if they were an anonymous user. For example, if I start a new book, and keep all pages as unpublished, the book navigation block doesn't build itself, and you can't navigate the book very easily until it is published. This makes reviewing and editing the book rather awkward (we have several editing stages by different users until it is approved, and pages marked as published).

I am considering mirroring the site and rolling changes back and forth that way, but that seems a rather heavyweight way of doing things.

How to others cope with unpublished content and navigation?

Thanks in advance,

Tom

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

You are right, "unpublished" is not easy to work with. The best you can do with "unpublished" is to give the users "administer nodes" permission for the whole site (which isn't secure) so that they can see the nodes listed in admin/content/node (which may be insufficient).

Another solution is moderation, using http://drupal.org/project/modr8

Yet another solution is to use an access control module such as http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_access, create a vocabulary with the categories "public" and "private", and allow only certain user roles to view/list/update/create nodes which are tagged "private".

Speaking of book outlines... not sure what happens if a page is public while its parent is private.

wessex’s picture

wessex commented

Thanks for letting me know about the modr8 module - it looks like it will be worth testing.

I'll have to see if the book outlines work!

Many thanks...

skessler’s picture

skessler
He/Him
Location Denver
commented

The Workflows (http://drupal.org/project/workflow) module is developed for just this purpose. I think you will find this will help you more than just taxonomy based access.

Steve Kessler skessler[at]denverdataman.com
Denver DataMan - http://www.denverdataman.com

Steve Kessler

cog.rusty’s picture

cog.rusty commented

Yes, it contains a submodule, workflow_access, which can control who can do what based on the state of a node.

wessex’s picture

wessex commented

Thanks once again for the suggestion of the modr8 module. It's just what I was looking for!