I've implemented part of our plans for restricting accessibility to documents based on their revisionDesc/@status value. Documents with these values will show up in search results:

• published
• stub
• empty

Documents with any other status (such as draft) will not be retrieved by the search engine. This does not prevent you from accessing such documents through their @xml:id attributes by predicting the URLs at which they should be found. It also doesn't prevent links to those documents from being created on the site. So the two ways to prevent a document from being accessed by the public, while ensuring that we can look at it on the site if we want to, are:

• set its status to e.g. draft or proofing
• don't link to it from any other page

Of course, if you never upload a document to the database at all, it can never show up.

This is a compromise which allows us to look at new documents the way they will appear on the site, while at the same time ensuring that the public don't stumble onto them by accident. A determined person could find such documents by looking at the page of xml:ids, of course.

The reason I've included "stub" and "empty" in the list of published pages is that it seems odd to search for "Bartholomew" and not find the document for "St. Bartholomew’s Hospital", even though that document might be empty; the empty document does link to the map, and call for contributed content.