The content moderation module in Drupal core is powerful way of allowing content to pass through a moderation workflow. This allows you to create workflows that take content from draft modes into a published state and back again.
Each content moderation state can have a "published" setting that tells Drupal if an item of content in this state should be considered as published. This means that if a page of content is put into a published state then users with the "view published content" permissions can view it.
Users would need the opposite permission "view any unpublished content" to be able to see a content in a state without this flag set.
It is possible to create multiple content moderation states with the "published" setting enabled. For example, you might have a workflow where users can set items of content into a "review" workflow in order to schedule it being updated but still have the content available. The content can then be moved into an unpublished state or updated and put back into a default published state.
The fact that this is possible got me thinking about how this system could be used to provide additional features on a site. It turns out that it is possible to create a workflow moderation state that is used as a way of promoting content. This would be used in the same way as the 'sticky' or 'front page' fields that come with Drupal.
In this article I will go through how to setup an additional published workflow state that can be used as a flag like this. I'll then go on to show how this can be extracted as information in the node templates.
Setting Up An Additional Published State
When you first install content workflow module you will get the Draft and Published states created for you. You just need to set up an additional state that you will use as a flag. For example, this could be "Promoted" but what you use depends on what you want to use it for.