Drupal developers of every level of experience understand that a menu item can point to any valid path, such as that of a node. But Drupal beginners can receive a nasty shock when they discover — usually the hard way — that changes to such nodes can result in unplanned and unpleasant changes to menus. Specifically, one of the more annoying traits of Drupal is the way a menu item disappears when its associated node is unpublished (or deleted, i.e., unpublished with extreme prejudice). This may be old news to Drupal veterans, but people new to this CMS can easily stumble into this pitfall.