There was no way to delete an article from anywhere in the interface. The API
had one; the only route to it was curl.
Now there is a control at the foot of the editor, and it does one of two things
depending on the article's history — and says which before it is pressed:
* A draft that was **never published** is deleted outright. There is nothing to
restore, and a trash full of abandoned stubs is a second list to maintain.
* Anything that has been published, even once, is **marked** and appears in the
trash on Editorial, restorable exactly as it was. Somewhere there is a
learner's note against one of its sections, a question linked to it, and a
link somebody sent a colleague; a DELETE typed in the afternoon should not
settle any of that.
`first_published_at` is what decides, stamped on the first publish and never
cleared — unpublishing does not make an article unseen, so it does not make
deleting it safe either. Backfilled from `reviewed_at` for everything currently
published, because an article with a null stamp reads to the rule as a
never-published draft.
A binned article is out of the listing, the editorial queue, every slug and id
lookup, and — immediately — the search index, so it cannot still answer a
learner's question from the trash.
Also on Editorial, because a hundred rows is a queue you work through and not a
page you scroll past on the way to the next queue: each bucket keeps its own
box, its own scrollbar and its own filter.
And the editor finally has a way out that is not Save: Back and Discard, with
an inline confirmation when there are unsaved changes. The way out was the
browser's back button, which throws the sitting away without saying so.
Migration j0a1b2c3d4e5.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
