Recently I was helping a client look into an issue with Publishing Pages that were mysteriously being moved to the Draft state.

After some investigation, it turned out to be related to the Scheduling End Date field from the Publishing Page Content Type.  Authors were using this field to prevent pages from showing up in a rollup via the Content Query Web Part.  They would set a date in the future and at that time, the article disappeared from the list.

What’s strange is that when this happened, the page switched back to Draft mode, but no entries of this change where logged in Version History.   Apparently the system does this behind the scenes.

While I guess this is desired behavior, the problem that they were facing is that these pages would no longer appear in search results because of their draft state.  The obvious solution was to create a new field that determines if the item should appear in a rollup and filter it via CQWP.

A simple SPD workflow that waits x number of days before setting this field solved the problem of forcing someone to do all of this manually.