How to let users create 'unpublished' content in Drupal 6

Basic Content authoring in Drupal

Each node in Drupal has an option to be 'Published' or 'Unpublished Published' under “Publishing Options” in the node edit screen. This enables content authors to be able to create content before publishing it on the live site. The field out of the "core" box can have the values of published and unpublished (this can be extended but that's a topic for another post).

Any basic authoring workflow would require content authors to be able to control the Published  state; however Drupal has two big permission based issues affecting the use of the Published option:

1. The ability to set “Publishing options” to is controlled by the permission “administer nodes” and assigning this permission to a role will allow users with that role to add/edit/delete any node of any type; bypassing your carefully crafted permission settings.
2. Only the content authors can access a piece of unpublished content (unless he is an admin or has “administer nodes” permission).

There are a number of modules that can help resolve these two issues and extend the workflow of content authoring but this post is about two modules that directly address these two issues and extend the Drupal role system to support the control of access (as it should be).

Issue 1 “Publishing options”

Resolved using override_node_options

This module provides permission settings for “override {content type} published option” allowing you to give roles access to the the “Publishing Options” without giving them the “administer nodes” permissions.
It also provides permissions for other publishing and authoring options the full list of permissions it provides are

• override authored by & authored on option
• override comment settings
• override published & sticky option
• override revision option

Issue 2 “Access unpublished content”

Resolved using view_unpublished
A simple module that adds two new options of “view all unpublished content” & “view unpublished {type} content”
This permission will allow users to view and edit unpublished nodes.

Other modules to consider are:

http://drupal.org/project/publishcontent
http://drupal.org/project/workflow
http://drupal.org/project/revisioning