Drupal Now Holds onto Deleted Pages for 30 Days

We have all done it: accidentally deleted something and then realized a minute later that we still needed part of it. To help alleviate the pain when that happens, Drupal will now keep pages you delete for thirty days before permanently deleting them. The pages will be unpublished, so they won’t appear to people who aren’t logged in as editors, but you’ll be able to see them in your menu and in a special list in the administration interface. We encourage you to delete content that you no longer need and is no longer relevant, with the knowledge that if that changes within a month, you can get it back.

To make this change, we have removed the “Delete” button from the bottom of the editing form and the admin toolbar. In its place, you will find a new “Deleted” option in the “Change to” field above the “Save” button, along with the previously available “Draft”, “Published”, and “Archived” options. See our documentation on workflows for more information about these options. Selecting “Deleted” and clicking “Save” will unpublish the page and queue it for deletion in thirty days.

Deleted content will appear in a list in the administration interface which you can access on most sites under the “Content” link in the admin toolbar through the “Queued for Deletion” link in its dropdown menu. On the Offices and Services site, this link is accessible under Edit Group and will show you only the content queued for deletion from that group.

The list shows all the content that will be deleted and the date and time when that will happen. To “undelete” a page, click the Edit button and then change the state to “Published”, “Draft”, or “Archived” from the same dropdown where you initially set it as “Deleted”. This will remove it from the queue and reset the timer.