The Publish flow sets up the rules for different statuses of an article. The Publish flow plugin has the rules for the differences between a new article and a saved article. It decides what preconditions that must be met for the article to transit from draft, to review, to scheduled or published and even to unpublished and republished statuses. In the publish flow settings you decide how the article should behave when it makes transitation to another state. You also decide what to call different parts of the workflow and if entering a certain state should lead to any specific actions such as setting a time when the article is publish or schedule a time for a future publishing. Roles can also be a part of the preconditions, so that only a certain role can do for examples reviews and make an article enter another status after the review.