Does an unpublished status mean Draft or Disabled?

There is a workflow tab in core; it displays towards the bottom when you are editing/creating a node. It only comes up only with the "administer nodes" permission. I actually already have a ticket pending regarding that*: http://drupal.org/node/214190

You shouldn't need a contributed module. What is the point of un-publishing a node then (vs. deleting it)? I went on IRC and no one could seem to be able to explain the logic behind why a node isn't accessible to its author if it is unpublished. It seems like being able to keep a "draft" version around that only the author can see is a basic functionality that belongs in the core.

* In our situation, we want our users to be able to manage the workflow of their own nodes, but giving them "administer nodes" means they can also edit each others' nodes. My ticket (pending 7-x) proposes an independent permission just for workflow access.

BTW, I should clarify: workflow = "Publish options"

Interesting, I didn't realize you could pull it up by explicitly referencing it in the browser.

I should refine what I think is the problem. Yes, a user can navigate to that node by explicitly visiting node/. However, from a common user's standpoint, that node is orphaned because there is no way to actually browse to it. My steps to reproduce would be:

* Give user/1 "administer nodes" permission.
* Create a node and in the process uncheck Published.
* (With or without "administer nodes" permission) If user/1 goes to My Recent Posts (tracker/1), the post should not be visible.

Expected behavior: Some way to get to the post without 1) explicitly referencing it in the URL, 2) a module adding said functionality.

There are a number of directions we can take this. My user's intuition was that "unpublished" means its a draft, and he/she can come back to it, work on it, and publish it later. The way it functions, however, is more closely aligned with enabled vs. disabled (even the field in the database is labeled "status"). So either we should treat unpublished as meaning draft mode, or we should change the language to enabled vs. disabled.

It seems like this is turning more into a feature request rather than a defect, so I'm bumping it to 7.x.

admin/content/node will get them to it - that's the route.

Well, for an admin. I'm talking about a regular authenticated user.

Yes, but in an earlier post I pointed out that we let our users manage their own publishing without giving them admin privileges (See: http://drupal.org/node/220825#comment-728290).