"Publish" status us currently considered boolean. It should instead be a matter of audience.

"Publish" status is currently considered boolean. It should instead be a matter of audience.

That Drupal currently understands the published state of nodes in terms of true or false results in far-reaching and expensive incompatibilities/bugs/workarounds which create unnecessary complexity in contrib or dependent modules/systems.

Rather than Drupal asking/determining whether a node is published (yes/no), Drupal should ask "who gets to see this content and under which conditions shall they see it?" The visibility of an entity should instead be a matter of audience. To re-imagine how this aspect of Drupal can be improved, do this now:

ALTER TABLE 'node' DROP 'status'

Then resolve for all use-cases involving the visibility of content. Such as:

• how to then make content visible to human users (who may or may not be authenticated)
• how to then make content visible in the form of revisions or drafts
• how to then make content visible to machines such as cron for search indexing, etc.
• how to then make content visible/controllable to a moderation-or-workflow system such as Workbench or Scheduler
• how to then make content visible to specific domains, and/or to specific languages

Discuss!

This is, in my opinion, one of Drupal's most fatal and most expensive design flaws. The time is past, I believe, to solve this for Drupal 8. Hopefully this issue can receive due attention before it's too late for Drupal 9.