Unpublished Links
Hide draft targets from visitors, restore them for editors

A page can be linked from your content before its target is published. Pushword routes don't 404 unpublished pages — visiting them by URL still renders the draft — so a raw <a href> to a draft slug leaks the URL to anonymous visitors. The HtmlUnpublishedLink filter rewrites those links at render time.

Contents

What it does

For every <a href="...">text</a> whose target is a Page that exists but is not yet published (publishedAt IS NULL or in the future), the filter emits:

<span title="Page en cours de publication" data-status="unpublished" data-href="/original">text</span>
  • The visible text stays.
  • The hyperlink is gone — anonymous visitors can no longer click through.
  • The original href is kept in data-href so JS can put the <a> back for editors.
  • The title tooltip helps debugging.

External links, anchors, mailto:, tel:, and links resolving to known published pages are left untouched.

Where it sits in the filter chain

ShowMore → LinkCollector → Markdown → HtmlLinkMultisite → HtmlUnpublishedLink → HtmlObfuscateLink → Extended

It runs after HtmlLinkMultisite (links are already resolved to absolute URLs cross-host) and before HtmlObfuscateLink. Obfuscated links pointing to drafts are seen as plain <a href> and get masked — no need to decode data-rot.

The shipped app.js bundle includes a small restorer that probes GET /_pushword/auth-check (204 = authenticated, 401 = anonymous), caches the result in sessionStorage, and rewrites each <span data-status="unpublished" data-href> back into an <a> for authenticated users. Restored links get data-unpublished="1" and a 0.6 opacity so editors can spot drafts at a glance.

This avoids per-user HTML cache invalidation: anonymous and authenticated visitors get the exact same HTML.

Pairing with pw:page-scan

The scanner used to flag every link to an unpublished target as an error. Now those links are handled gracefully at render time, so the check is opt-in:

php bin/console pw:page-scan                       # quiet about unpublished targets
php bin/console pw:page-scan --check-unpublished   # list every link pointing to a draft

Run with --check-unpublished when you want a pre-publication audit (e.g. "what would change once I publish this draft?").

Static generator caveat

The HTML built by pw:static is frozen at generation time. If page A links to page B while B is a draft, A's generated HTML will contain the <span> placeholder. When B later gets published, A is not automatically rebuilt — you need to re-run the static generation for A (or any wholesale rebuild) for the <a> to come back in the static output. Editors browsing the live app are not affected.