The post statuses are managed through the “Publish” meta box, which is displayed in the top right corner of the screen when you’re editing a post or page. There are eight post statuses in WordPress, but some of them are more common than others. If you have been using WordPress for a while, you’re probably already familiar with the following three:
- Draft: A post that has been saved, but isn’t visible to visitors on the site.
- Published: A post that has been published and is visible to all visitors on the site.
- Trashed: A post that has been moved to trash, but not permanently deleted. Trashed posts are not visible for visitors.
You probably aren’t as familiar with the following ones:
- Scheduled: A post that has been given a future publication date, and has been set to be published on that date.
- Pending: A post that has been created by a user with a user role that disallows him or her from publishing the post themselves. The post must be approved by a user with a more capable user role before it is visible to visitors.
- Private: A post that is only visible to users with the administrator user role.
- Auto-Draft: A revision of a post that has been saved automatically while you were typing.
- Inherited: Used in rare instances when something inherits the post status of its parent post. Most commonly used for attachments, which inherit the post status of the post they are attached to.
It is also possible for themes and plugins to add custom post statuses, so your WordPress installation might have more statuses than the ones listed above.
Post Status is also the name of one of the biggest WordPress news sites.