The more I think about this as I am using Fibery, the more I think it might be good to be a global setting of some kind. For example I’d also like to have this filtering for back-links! And having to add filter controls to search and backlinks, and maybe other places may be non-ideal, or at least may be down the road for implementation. I have a thought as to how it might work though, still being customizable and flexible, but without making the UI too complex. These are just ideas, of course.
So what if you put the visibility setting for entities of a given status within the Workflow Extension settings? There are at least two ways this could be handled, I think. One potentially more powerful or “clean” (or maybe easier to implement?) than the other, but less “discoverable”.
First, you could simply add visibility control to the Workflow Extension settings panel. This could take the form of a more rigid and simple toggle “hide “Completed” entities from searches”, and maybe a separate toggle for “Hide completed entities from backlinks”. OR more powerfully, have a multi-select field there to select from the actual workflow options above, so you’d have one multi-select field “Hide these Statuses from Searches by Default” and another “Hide these Statuses from Backlinks”, and you could select “Closed”, but also any other status you want. If multi-select is hard to implement for this, it could be a single select. If more power is desired…
You could instead implement the same/similar within each Status Option (Alt-Click to reach settings from within a given Entity). So within e.g. “Closed” you’d have the existing options, Color and Icon, and then toggles for “Visible by default in searches” and “Visible in backlinks”. I thought this might be more powerful, but now I think about it, the multi-select above should accomplish the same thing, and may be the better approach unless it’s not possible, or you need to have more controls for different areas where you want to control entity visibility by status.
In either case, on any Search pop-up, perhaps have a toggle “Disable all filters”. This would work well as long as the preferred and most common filter state was set on each Workflow Extension for each Type, which I think is a good way to handle it. Then if you really need to access an old, closed entity, you can, it’s a little more inconvenient, but more importantly the most common use case is much more convenient, and also configurable on a per-type basis.