Draft vs. entry status

[seamusmh]

It's a bit confusing that a draft can be enabled or disabled. Status doesn't appear to matter, which tripped up a couple clients on the last update. Edit screen icon also looks like a broken page and doesn't match the other status icons.

[brandonkelly]

Draft statuses determine which status the entry will get once the draft has been published.

We’ve received quite a bit of feedback that the entry publishing workflow in 3.6 is confusing though, and we’re working to improve it for 3.7.

[seamusmh]

Looking forward to see it's evolution, clients all love drafts & preview links, so the smoother the experience the better.

[millman2394]

Kind of basic, but I found the color choice of the button for draft vs save entry to be poor. constantly find myself saving draft instead of publishing entries

[tomkiss]

☝️Aha yes, me too I'm afraid, I'm constantly getting confused between drafts and the publish flow. At the moment I'm working on an unpublished post with a disabled entry status. I'm finding the terminology of the "publish draft" button conflicting with the notion of a disabled post (it won't get published as such, until it is enabled). And I keep finding myself on the edit page and unable to click anything, thinking that the page has crashed, but then scrolling up to see a "Keep draft" / "Delete draft" popup blocking clicks.
FWIW I found the way it was working before to be fine, comparatively.

Great to hear that you're on it and look forward to seeing the improvements in the next version.

[jonlongnecker]

I just spent 30 minutes trying to use the current workflow and explain it to my client who just upgraded from Craft 2. Unfortunately it's gotten even more confusing than when I used it recently. Here's what I ended up writing her for reference for anyone else trying to figure out the publishing workflow:

1. If you go to edit an entry, but DON’T turn on live preview the main red button just says “Save” and it does what you’d expect. Updates the entry to the live site immediately.
2. If you edit an entry and click “Create a Draft” OR go into Live Preview then a new draft is created automatically.
3. This is where it gets confusing. The buttons now change to “Save Draft” and “Publish Draft”
4. If you “Save Draft” - which is what I’d do cause it's bright red - it does save a draft of your edits, but doesn’t publish them to the live site
5. Even more confusing, clicking save dumps you back in the entries list, and if you go back to edit the entry (because your changes won't be on the live site yet) your changes aren’t shown by default in the editor, you have to go into the “current" dropdown and load up your latest draft.
6. Then you have to “Publish Draft” to get it to show up on the live site.
7. You can bypass Swapping a Matrix field to another will leave orphaned schema + data in the database #4-6 if you just “Publish Draft” the first time instead of saving it. But the UI places the emphasis on the save button because it’s red. Add in that the non-draft version of editing uses the "save" terminology, and it's just all confusing.

I feel like we're still dealing with the whole "Create a draft if Live Preview is enabled" thing which kicks off a host of other issues. If I go into live preview, I had no intent of creating a draft to begin with. And now I have the draft workflow I have to learn even though I just wanted to make a few changes, look at it live preview, and save it. Is there a way to disable drafts all together? This workflow complexity is overkill for all my client sites.

Related - I tried searching for some kind of documentation or explanation of the publishing workflow and didn't come up with anything current. Is this new flow documented anywhere that I could point my clients to help alleviate the confusing UI?

[brandonkelly]

This is now resolved for 3.7 – see #7899.

Unpublished drafts will continue to exist as a concept, however they’ll be less frequent since new entries’ primary submit button will now fully save/publish the entry.