Draft functionality

I've been addressing a need for a Workflow/Draft functionality on a project and was surprised to discover Drupal's lack of any robust support for this sort of thing. It seems to be that this would be a given for any serious CMS.

There are many modules that address pieces of the problem, but there's no ideal solution and the need to jump through hoops to implement a basic workflow is fairly frustrating. I'm sure I can rig up an adequete solution, but I would love to see some consideration given to this in v.6. It seems to me that most of the problem could be addressed by ammending the permissions capability of the node module.

1. Making the "administer nodes" a non-global permission. It currently overrides all the contents type permissions that follow it. I think it would be much better if it worked in concert with the content type permissions allowing the administration "content" link for multiple levels of permission and only giving access to a role's authorized content types.

You can currently turn off "administer nodes" for a role and give them "create" and "edit" permissions for a specific content type, but this assumes that node is published when it's created. If it's not published, then the author will have no access to the node without a specific address. You can use the list module to build them an access, but that just another hoop to jump through.

2. Add a "publish" permission to the content types permissions.

3. Add the ability to schedule the publication of nodes.

I think that just these three additions to the node module's functionality would go a long way to improving Drupal's workflow abilities. Most other workflow needs could be addressed by other modules, like "Workflow NG".