Feat Request: Make unpublished pages visible in menu for privileged user roles

STATUS QUO

Your plugin Nested Pages allows one to create pages in bulk as drafts and create a corresponding menu structure for those unpublished pages. One can “sketch out how the website eventually shall be” and then gradually fill up content, and when publishing multiple pages at once (via Bulk Edit), they will have their prepared menu position right at publication. Great workflow improvement already! But one thing is missing.

USER GOAL

As an Admin/Editor I want to test the full website UX of content + navigation in advance. Experience the “menu as it will be” and test problems with the information architecture / user orientation prior publication. Also test the device specific UX (Smartphones, Tablets, SmartTVs, etc) prior publication.

FEATURE PROPOSAL

Privileged roles should be able to access unpublished pages (? already possible) PLUS also how those unpublished pages will fit into the frontend menu (?? not yet possible, new feature) — whereas disallowed users and web spiders see neither (? Content inaccessible ; URL not in sitemap ; No corresponding menu item).

TESTED YOUR EXISTING GLOBAL OPTION “Include private items in the menu”

I tested whether General → Menu Sync → Include private items in the menu may allow my workflow.

After I had overcome the bug that turning on this global setting is not effective for existing private pages, but only for changes of post statuses thereafter, it henceforth worked.

But it does not fulfill my intended workflow:

• 1) It is only for the “Private” post-status.
• 2) It is not role-specific either. Admin, Editor, Anonymous all got the URL into the menu.
• a) Admin: Entry in menu (normal slug), full page access, “Private: ” prefix in the title.
• b) Editor and Anonymous: Cannot access the page (404), Entry in menu (pointing to ID not slug). Anonymous should never ever see a menu entry for unpublished pages in my intended workflow.

PROPOSAL DETAILS

I would like to only manage the post-status of pages, which the WordPress workflow anyhow enforces upon you, and which works reliably. And on top of that would like the visibility of their corresponding menu items follow accordingly. Just with a slightly tweaked behavior: Unpublished pages ARE visible in the menu to legitimated user roles.

v0 aka “proof of concept” aka “MVP”

• This would be hardcoded to Admin + Editor.
• Either as a plugin or by extending functions.php, both fine to me.

v1 could have some customization settings

Menu items corresponding to:

    Post types: ?? Pages ?? Posts ?? Products ?? CustomType
     of status: ?? Draft ?? Pending ?? Future ?? Private
are visible to: ?? Admin ?? Editor ?? Contributor ?? Subscriber

E.g. you can disable visibility for “Draft” pages in the menu in order to have less “noise” but wants the other statuses there. And you want to customize how the status is denoted. Currently that’s hardcoded for Post Titles. And for menu status is not denoted, that would be something new too.

Denote Post Status in Menu Item and/or Page Title like this:

Post Status | Menu Title        | Page Title                |
-------------------------------------------------------------
Draft       | [ Prefix ? ] : ?? | [ Suffix ? ] : (Draft)    |
Pending     | [ Prefix ? ] : ? | [ Suffix ? ] : (Pending)  |
Future      | [ Prefix ? ] : ?? | [ Suffix ? ] : (Upcoming) |
Private     | [ Prefix ? ] : ?? | [ Suffix ? ] : (VIP)      |

v2 could get more fine grained

Create rulesets: Add new rule, select roles in that group, select which post types of what status they shall see. Create as many rulesets necessary to handle who shall see what exactly in the menu.