This post follows up on the tech tip I recorded for Episode 270 of the Just the Books podcast. This continues the series about websites and how they’re made. This series is not intended to deeply explore the topic, the primary goal is to build a foundation for understanding how websites are put together, the tools that can be used, and how innovation is changing and advancing this topic.
WordPress Posts have two primary states, or status: Draft or Published. In addition you can set content visibility for a post, but this is done for each individual post.
Other post states and User Roles will be covered in a future tip.
If you wish to customize WordPress and change these settings, there are many plugins available to help. Some will help you with post visibility and others with user management.
Please don’t get post visibility confused with the privacy setting for allowing search engines to index your site (or not)!
If you are hosted at wordpress.com, there is a privacy settings available to allow you to make the entire site accessible only by authorized and logged-in users.
This is possible to do for self-hosted WordPress installations, but you need to use plugins.