Context and motivation

Several projects in recent years have been requesting this extra layer of capability where a user is only allowed to sent an item "to be approved" by someone with higher capabilities. We've been doing this usually by not allowing the user to "publish" items as public, only as private, or maybe only as draft. The first approach can be misleading as private items are in a certain way, finished, they are only not suit for external visitors visualization. The last one has the disadvantage of loosing required metadata validation, as draft items can be incomplete.

We do know that WordPress has a separate status for pending posts. However we are not aware of the internals. Why isn't it available as a default state? Does it offer some sort of "delegation" layer where one can define which user is required to approve the changes? This can be quite complex to add now at this state of the project, but should be something worth investigating.

To complement this, I should also mention that there is one future status, which is used to schedule posts publishing. We may discuss if this is something that fits into our scenarios.

Ideal solution

A new status option, dedicated for indicating items that are "pending approval". This would require also new capability layers for users and maybe a step or setting where we define moderators.