The Problem
Drupal comes with two flags for promoting content, Promoted to front page and Sticky at top of lists. A site that wants a third, say "Editor's Pick", usually ends up with a boolean field on each content type that needs it. That works, but the field's checkbox lands in the main column of the edit form, with the title and body. Core keeps its two in the sidebar, apart from the content.
What I Built
I built Publishing Options, a contributed module for site builders who need more flags than Drupal gives them. They create each option once, in a single list under Configuration, and choose the content types that get it. No content type gets a new field, because the module stores the options itself. Editors see each option as a checkbox in Promotion options, the same sidebar group as core's two.
Every option also works in Views as a field, a filter or a contextual filter. So a "Featured article" block or page is a view filtered on that option. The Publishing Options Block submodule brings the options to custom blocks, Views support included. Block support needs version 3.1.0-rc1 or later.
The Result
The module needs nothing outside Drupal core. It has lived on drupal.org since 2019 and is still actively developed. Its stable releases fall under the Drupal security advisory policy. As of October 2026, drupal.org shows 70 sites using it. Another contributed module, Custom Publishing Options, solves the same problem and is a good choice too.
I wrote the full story, from how the module started to how it is built, in the blog post Custom Publishing Options for Drupal.
