Publishing Options

Lots of people find the publishing options in Drupal confusing. The bottom of every form to submit content has a block called "Publishing Options". This area lets you set the publishing options for this piece of content. The area looks like this:

Note that there is a default on or off value for each of these for each content type. These were probably set by your system administrator. Some of them are really most useful if they are set to default to being on for a particular content type. Note also that these buttons will only appear for you if you have the administrate nodes permission set for your role, so they should only appear for people who are supposed to have editing control over your site.

The different option buttons here will do the following:

Published - This sets a flag on the content you are editing that marks it as being published. Normally this means that it will actually appear on the site. If it's not published, the content will be stored, but it will remain invisible to most users.

Promoted to Front Page - This will normally take the piece of content and put it on the front page of your site. However, if you have a particularly highly customized theme that does not have a "normal" Drupal front page content area, this may not do anything on your particular site.

Sticky at the top of the lists - This one is confusing. This is another flag that is set on the content that tells the system that if it is shown in a list of things, then this item will float to the top of the list. For example, this might be useful if you were running a business directory, and you had some people who have paid you for your listing - you could set the paid listings to appear at the top of all lists.

Create New Revision - This invokes revisions in the system. Drupal is capable of maintaining a new revision (or copy) of your content every time you make a change. If you create a new revision, it will save the changes you made as a new revision copy, so that you may later on revert back to this version if you need to.

In Moderation Queue - This will only appear if your Drupal installation supports moderation. The idea here is that you may have some content types created as Moderated. If the content is in moderation it will not immediately appear on the site, but will need to be approved by someone who has moderation permissions on the site. The content will appear on the site as soon as one of the moderators turns this flag off. This will only appear for people who have moderation permission, and this is one of those flags that is mostly only useful if it is turned on by default for a content type.