Sometimes, I would like to restrict the way the Joomla front end editing works. More specifically, I want to restrict access to some of the features in the front end editing.
On one site I work on, I've restricted access to the 'Publish' and 'Show on Front Page' buttons. For this particular site, I want local editors of an organization to be able to enter new articles, and to edit the published articles. I don't want the local editors to be able to publish to the front page. This is something the editor-in-chief should do. Thus, this function needs to be removed from the front end editor.
I did this by editing the form page used to edit articles.
If you know some HTML and can read PHP you can remove / comment out the parts of the file you don't want the users to see. This will happen for all users without administrator privileges, though. I've put together a modification which removes the radio buttons for 'Publish' and 'Show on Front Page' if the user belongs to a lower access level groups than 'Manager'.