Publication status, scheduling and revisions
You may not want to publish all the content you create in Drupal for public viewing straight away. In this section, we’ll look at how you can work with drafts, as well as schedule dates and times for publication and unpublishing. The information in this text applies to subpages, articles and events.
Publication status of content
When creating content in Drupal, there are three different statuses:
Draft
Published
Unpublished
Published
The page, article or event has been published and is available for visitors to view.
Unpublished
Content saved as 'unpublished' disappears from the website, but not from Drupal.
Draft
The ‘Save as draft’ option is always selected by default, so remember to change it if you want to publish straight away. If you select ‘Draft’, the content is saved – but not published. This option can be useful, for example, if you need to make changes to an article that has already been published but don’t want the new revisions to go live immediately; perhaps you want to continue writing the next day or let a colleague have a look first. In that case, you save the new changes as a Draft, but the original version remains published. You can also save as a draft when you’ve created new content that you haven’t finished and intend to complete at a later date.
All saved drafts in Drupal can be found under 'Moderated content'
To help you keep track of all content saved as drafts across the entire website, there is also a list called ‘Moderated content’. Go to Content > List all content in the admin menu. Here you will find the ‘Overview’ tab, as well as ‘Moderated content’ – where everything currently waiting as a draft is displayed.
View previous versions of the content
At the top of the "Revisions" tab, you will find an overview of all the versions of the article that have been published. They are listed in chronological order, with the most recent version at the top. The "Current revision" is the version currently online, and you can also click on the date and time to view that version.
Restore content from previous versions
You can always choose to revert to a previous version of the content. Simply click "Revert" on the version you wish to use. Please note that you should not revert to a previous version that is a draft, but only to versions that have been published.
Content scheduling
You can also schedule the publication of an article, page or calendar event, so that the content is published or unpublished automatically at a specific time.
What happens is that your content is saved as a draft, and you then select a date and time; when that time comes, the page’s status changes from draft to published. The same applies in reverse if you set a time for the post to be unpublished. Instructions follow below.
Go to the Edit mode for the article/page/event.
Among the settings in the right-hand column is the "scheduling options" tab.
Expand this section to view the publication date and the date the post will be taken down. If you want the article to be published at a specific time, select it here under "Publish on". You can also choose the date and time for the post to be taken down. It can sometimes take up to 15 minutes after the time you’ve selected for the content to appear on the website, so bear this in mind when choosing a time.
Save by clicking 'Save' at the bottom of the page.
You can find all scheduled content under 'Scheduled content'
To get an overview of all scheduled content, go to Scheduled content. You can do this via the admin menu by selecting Content > Manage content > Scheduled content.