[Bug]: New pages remain in Draft when Versioning is enabled and Workflow is disabled

[tvatavuk]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

What happened?

When Versioning is enabled and Workflow is disabled, any newly created page is automatically placed into the Draft state.
Because Workflow is disabled, there is no mechanism to publish that Draft, leaving the page permanently invisible to all users except Content Managers.

This behavior effectively blocks page creation in this configuration.

Steps to reproduce?

1. Install a clean DNN 10.1.2 instance.
2. Go to Site Settings / Site Behavior / More, in workflow settings enable Versioning.
3. Ensure that Workflow is disabled (no workflow assigned to the site).
4. Create a new page.

Current Behavior

The new page is created in Draft state.
With no workflow assigned, there is no option to publish the page.
The page remains inaccessible to all users except Content Managers.

Expected Behavior

New page should be created in the Published state, since no workflow is active and no review/publish cycle exists.

Relevant log output

Anything else?

This bug was mentioned in comments of closed issue, like:

• [Bug]: New pages created in DNN 10 can not display to Everyone #6736 (comment)

Workaround

A temporary workaround exists:

1. Enable the Direct Publish workflow at the site level.
2. Open Advanced Page Search, filter by Draft, and publish all affected pages.
3. Disable workflow/versioning again as needed.

Affected Versions

10.1.2 (latest v10 release)

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[Tychodewaard]

To elaborate: when versioning is not enabled, workflow is not enabled either (which makes sense) and the described behaviour (pages remain in draft status) also happens in this scenario