Wordpress: How to add additional folder for articles, besides draft and published/unpublished?

Question

I automatically add articles as drafts to wordpress with script, moderator approves articles and publishes them or sends to some "storage" folder, so I to be able to train my machine learning algorithms on them. I've used to use folder "trash" for storing unapproved articles with

define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 999 );

in wp-config.php but it does not seem to work, articles are getting deleted anyway. So I think I should add additional category for articles besides "draft", "published", etc. I've read wordpress codex but it seems this topic isn't covered by it and googling yields nothing useful, only "101 wordpress tips" types of pages.

Another question, how to implement additional category in such way further updates won't break it? Or may be I'm just doing it all wrong?

Answer 1

Using custom post type will be the best solution in this situation. Here are some references for creating and managing custom post types in wordpress:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-use-custom-post-types/

http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/create-your-first-wordpress-custom-post-type

http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types