When you are writing a new article from your blog admin panel, that new post will not visible to the public (blog visitors) until you actually publish it. That way you can save your post as a draft until you are done making the edits.
The current status of your post is always shown in the “Publish” panel docked by default on the right-hand side of your wordpress post editor.
A new post is automatically saved as a draft thanks to the WordPress autosave feature. It also helps you recover the changes you made to your post should something go wrong. However I recommend you regularly save your work by using the “Save Draft” button shown in the screen capture above.
However you can change the status of the current post by just clicking the “Edit” link in the status line. That will reveal a drop-down list where you can change the status of your new post from “Draft” to “Pending Review”.
This functionality comes really handy for blogs managed by an entire team of contributors, editors and administrators.
For instance a blog contributor can write a new article and when she’s done, change the status of that post from draft to pending review. That way, the post current status is displayed in the “posts” list, allowing the editor or administrator to quickly scan for new posts that requires here attention before going live.
Clcik the “Edit” link in the “Visibility” section to reveal the options available. The visibility of any published post can be set to one of the following three states:
- public meaning anyone visiting the blog can see that post.
- password protected to be only viewed by users given the proper credentials. In this case, you need to define a password that you can share with those members to grant them access to the post. Those visitors will be prompted to enter the password to see that post.
- private for the post to be only viewed by you the publisher, the blog editors and administrators
This feature allows you to set the level of access to any information in your blog without the need of an extra program.
When your new post is ready for prime time, you have two ways of making it available to the public:
- you can decide to publish it immediately by just clicking the “Publish” button. Your new post, will be automatically be published and displayed in your blog’s home page and the categories that post is placed in.
- you also have the option of scheduling your new article for publication. In that case, all you have to do is specify the date and time you would like that post to be published.
Post schedule is a really handy WordPress feature. You can write several posts ahead of time and schedule each to be publish at a date and time of your choice. Therefore your blog can be supplied with fresh content even when you are away on vacation as long as you have articles in the queue.
