Beginner's Guide

Chapter 8
Statuses, Trash and Check-Ins
In Joomla your content can have several statuses. Depending on the type of content there can be a
minimum of three statuses: published, unpublished and trash. What does that mean? After saving
your fresh content for the first time, it exists in the Joomla database and depending on its status, it will
appear (or not) in different areas of your website.
The usual life cycle of content in Joomla is:
1. unpublished until you are finished with editing and reviewing
2. published or scheduled (and possibly featured on the frontpage)
3. still published but may be removed from the frontpage
4. archived
Sometimes it is necessary to unpublish content and sometimes you may put it into the trash. The
content itself will, of course, continue to exist. It has not been deleted. You can filter most of the tables
in the administration interface by the desired statuses and assign different statuses to your content as
often as you would like.
Unpublished
No website visitor is able to see the content. It is the phase in which you edit and review your
content.
Published
It depends on the users’ and visitors’ permissions whether they will be able to view the content but
generally the content on your website should be visible because it has been published!
Featured
The featured 'feature' is a switch you can use for your most important and latest content and is usually
shown at the frontpage. It is an additional status because it is only relevant to articles. This is why it is
possible for an article to be unpublished and featured.
Archived
There will come a time when you'll start thinking about an archive for your articles. Just set the status
to archived and you've almost created an archive. Joomla knows the creation date of your articles and
offers an archive module to be shown on your site. The archive module is included in the example data.
Joomla! 2.5 - Beginner’s Guide
Monday, 30 January 2012! Page 98