John Paul writes:

I just set up a CMF portal with a couple of custom types and noticed that CMF Article in private and pending status are viewable if the Reviewer knows the URL for them unlike other content types like News Item and Document which notifies the reviewer when a certain news items or document are in pending mode. I do not fully understand the problem description.

When you are complaining that your reviewers do not see pending CMF Articles: This is implemented by a so called DC Workflow "Worklist". A worklist is essentially a catalog query, you can customize TTW (Through The Web). When you do not see some pending objects, the catalog query does not return them. This may be a permission issue or the objects do not have the "correct" workflow state (as expressed by the workflow variable "review_state"). This may happen when the objects have their own workflow. Dieter