Disabling automatic publish of default pages in publishing sites

Question

I've been trying to research how to disable the automatic publishing of the default page for publishing sites, to no avail. Does MOSS 2007 possess the ability to do this?

Basically, when the site is created, my managers are looking for the functionality to be; the site starts as a draft until the content has been added and then the authors can publish the page. I know that the pages can be manually changed from published to draft, however we are going to have a plethora of authors who possess a wide range of varying computer literacy. The approach we're looking to take is to make this process automatic upon creation of a new publishing site.

Answer 1

I would substitute a default "Under Construction" page in your publishing site templates.  The problem is that if you have only a draft page for a publishing site then users will still be able to navigate to the site, but won't be able to see the home page because there is no published version.  They'll get an error message instead.  It would be better to have a default page that is published(so users don't get an error).   You could then either have the authors edit a different page and use the ribbon to change what page is the home page when that page is ready for publishing or just edit the "Under Construction" page and publish the completed version when ready to be revealed.

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Paul Stork SharePoint Server MVP
Principal Architect: Blue Chip Consulting Group
Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog
Twitter: Follow @pstork
Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.

Answer 2

Thank you Paul. I will make a case with my management for this. I'm curious though, is something like what they want me to do even possible in Sharepoint non-programmatically?

Answer 3

No, it wouldn't be possible without major modification programmatically.  It would also result in a system that provided a terrible user experience.  There are ways to accomplish what they want, which is to keep users from seeing a partially completed site.  But as I said I would rather show them a different default page then an error message.

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Paul Stork SharePoint Server MVP
Principal Architect: Blue Chip Consulting Group
Blog: http://dontpapanic.com/blog
Twitter: Follow @pstork
Please remember to mark your question as "answered" if this solves your problem.

Answer 4

Again Paul, thank you. I really appreciate the help on this one. I'll take this information back and hopefully we can work something out more along the lines of what you recommended.