node

Drupal 7's database layer makes use of transactions in several places. Be careful when you expect to see the results of node_save() outside of the scope of the current request. If someone accesses your website data before the transaction has been committed, the results of queries executed within are not visible. Either all queries succeed or nothing happens at all in a database transactions.

Finding a module
drupal node info block
site:drupal.org node information block module
http://drupal.org/project/about_this_node

if not displayed

creation date and time

creation author (user who created the node)

And also:

promoted to front page status

sticky status

node ID (NID)

published status

commenting status (enabled, read only, or disabled)

should theoretically be visible

The nodeapi ops were turned into hook_node_[operation] functions, such as:

No answer:
How Can I Search Unpublished Content?
http://drupal.org/node/300803

Romania had a similar issue:
Can't access unpublished content that needs editing
http://drupal.ro/node/2394

Motivation for this function: sure, we could use a plain node_load($nid) and wrap every $node->field['0']['value'] in a check_plain or the function for rendering with the proper input format (check_plain). The proper format is available to be grabbed from the data provided by a regular node_load. But that's a lot of work and not the way we're used to theming things in .tpl.php