Access control for unpublished pages

Hello everyone,

I use Drupal to run a small volunteer organization's website. There are some pages that are intended only for logged-in users. Until now, I did that by marking them as "not published" and it worked.

Now, however, I'm trying to un-clutter the content creation interface for users. To do this, I tried to take away the permission to "administer nodes" for non-admin users as suggested in http://drupal.org/node/135124 . This, however, also meant that those users could no longer access the unpublished pages I created.

Obviously, I'm not doing it The Drupal Way :-) I'm looking for a good way to:

- manage access rights on a per-node basis
- provide the authors a simple checkbox, just like "published/unpublished" now, to decide whether the node they currently create will be visible for everyone or just for logged-in users
- further unclutter the backend by removing the (then unneeded) "promoted" / "published" checkboxes.

Many thanks in advance

Jürgen