# Draft vs. Published vs. Hidden

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/draft-vs-published-vs-hidden/116616>\
**Category:** Radiant CMS\
**Created:** [October 8, 2007, 1:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/draft-vs-published-vs-hidden/116616 "2007-10-08T01:00:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![richardchaven](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e480ec/32.png) [@richardchaven](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richardchaven)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2007, 1:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/draft-vs-published-vs-hidden/116616/1 "2007-10-08T01:00:35Z")

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I have a question about the different status’ that pages can have. I  
(think  
I) understand the purpose for Draft & Published but I’m not too sure  
about  
Hidden. Can I hide pages to test them? Is there some secret URL that I  
can  
use to get to them? I would like to be able to “test” a set of pages in  
production to make sure they work properly or my environment can handle  
the  
load before I make them available to the public. I’m thinking that  
something like Hidden would work well for that, unless it’s just  
equivalent  
to Draft and you can’t get to it. Any thoughts?

Later…  
Richard

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**Author:** ![richardchaven](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e480ec/32.png) [@richardchaven](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richardchaven)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2007, 3:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/draft-vs-published-vs-hidden/116616/2 "2007-10-08T03:14:44Z")

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There are really only two statuses (stati? statae?) that affect the  
actual appearance of a page: Published and (anything else). When  
searching for pages, only published pages will be shown, unless you are  
on the “dev” site (subdomain). It will show any page that you know the  
URL of, even if it has not been published.

Sean

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![richardchaven](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e480ec/32.png) [@richardchaven](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richardchaven)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2007, 6:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/draft-vs-published-vs-hidden/116616/3 "2007-10-08T06:04:46Z")

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With regards to page statuum…

Just to clarify what Sean said, you CAN access your drafts via  
[dev.yoursite.com](http://dev.yoursite.com). This sounds like what you were looking for. It’s  
hidden that you can’t get to.

So I guess that makes three states (ha):

1. Visible everywhere (published)
2. Visible only on the development version of your site (drafts)
3. Completely hidden (uh, hidden)

By the way, I’ve often used hidden kind of like a folder for  
organizational purposes. I’ll create a ‘css’ page and make it hidden  
then put all my css pages below it as: /css/myfile.css

One thing I’ve never considered until now is whether you could also use  
hidden to escape from site navigation (so your site menu would auto  
populate for /products, /contact, /about, but not /hidden/other/stuff).  
Have to test that one first though…

Anyone other more obvious uses for hidden out there (that I obviously  
missed).

-Chris