Each of your pages can have one of four statuses which can be altered in the CMS at any time.

Draft

This is the default status for new pages. These pages are work in progress and are only visible when you are logged in to the CMS.

Public

Public pages are visible to all visitors to your site provided the publish date is not set to a date in the future.

Private

Private pages are completed pages that you want to restrict to administrators’ use only. An example might be some internal best practice guidelines that you have created that you only want visible to members of your team.

Archived

Archived pages have reached their archive date and are not visible unless you are logged in to the CMS.

So what happens if a visitor or search engine has a link to a page that has been archived or made private? The CMS has built-in pages that handle these eventualities. If you try to access an archived or private page, a friendly message is displayed if you are not logged in. Give it a try now.

And if a visitor attempts to view a page that doesn’t even exist, they are directed to a “page not found” message. Give it a try now.