Dave,
i just checked in a small modification of xowiki + xotcl-core that handles items with different publish_statues differently. It distinguishes between publish_status 'production' and 'ready'. The status can be toggled from the admin pages. When the new package_parameter "production_mode" is set, an edit results in a page in state "production" which needs to be made "ready" from the admin pages. The various aggregators from xowiki (e.g. weblog, last_visited, ...) don't display pages in 'production' mode.
It is not completely clear to me, how this is supposed to interact with the live_revision, and what to do on links pointing to pages not 'ready'.
