"Unpublish" effectively does nothing

[jmcapra]

Describe the Bug.

The admin panel's "unpublish" feature does not work as expected, as described in the reprod steps.

Recommended solution: replace "unpublish" with "Revert to...." which allows you to select any previous published version to revert to, or "Unpublish" the entire doc.

Related issue: https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/issues/11942

Reproduction Steps

1. On a collection with autosave and draft enabled, create a new document and publish.
2. You should have v1 - initial doc, v2 - autosave, v3 - current published version.
3. Make some changes - v4 is created with status "autosave, draft".
4. Publish v4, creating v5 with status "published".
5. Click "unpublish" on the newly created v5.
6. The document leaves v5 as "published" and creates a v6 with status "draft"....

So, your newly added changes are left intact, (not "unpublished"), and there is no way to fully "unpublish" a document/post unless you delete it or manually set status: draft on each version of the document.

Environment Info

Binaries:
  Node: 22.12.0
  npm: 10.9.0
  Yarn: N/A
  pnpm: 9.15.0
Relevant Packages:
  payload: 3.35.1
  next: 15.3.0
  @payloadcms/db-mongodb: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/email-nodemailer: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/graphql: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/live-preview: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/live-preview-react: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/next/utilities: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/payload-cloud: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/plugin-cloud-storage: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/plugin-form-builder: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/plugin-nested-docs: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/plugin-redirects: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/plugin-search: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/plugin-seo: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/richtext-lexical: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/storage-uploadthing: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/translations: 3.35.1
  @payloadcms/ui/shared: 3.35.1
  react: 19.1.0
  react-dom: 19.1.0

[jmcapra]

A workaround I've found is to just add a "published" checkbox field, and make sure to respect that anywhere we query for the collection. Still unsure how to remove un-published posts from the auto generated search results though.

[nilskaspersson]

I took note of this on this morning as well; "Unpublish" seems to do virtually nothing, and there seems to be no way to hook into the action either.

I had some code that would revalidate a lot of cached paths when a document was unpublished (in order to hide it), when I noticed that the revalidation was actually invoked every time autosave triggered while editing a published document.

[lcnogueira]

I noticed the issue @nilskaspersson mentioned above, and I also have a (typical) use case right now where I need to hook into the unpublish button, and there seems to be no way to handle this.

[d717an]

Had a similar challenge on our project. Our workaround leverages the work from @cbratschi in #4616. We can filter out saves (manual or autosave) by checking for draft: true in the req's query params. The unpublish event occurs without those params with doc._status === 'draft (at least for now).

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell the difference between a doc being published via the "Publish" button and a doc's draft being discarded with the "Revert to Published" button.

It would help us greatly to have specific events or query params for publish, unpublish, revert to published, etc.

[cbratschi]

The introduction of soft delete (trash) added some more complexity and there is no hook for soft delete/undelete either. I hope this gets at least addressed in Payload 4.x together with better localized documents handling.