Headline says it.
I tried to use hooks (panel.page.update, panel.page.sort, panel.page.hide, panel.site.update) to intercept the popup of the modal dialog “Do you really want to change the status of this page to visible?”, but to no avail.
The hooks are only triggered after an event, you can‘t use them to intercept anything.
If you don’t want the modals, I think you have two options:
- modify the source code
- hide the sidebar toggle and use a publish checkbox; when the page is saved, change the visibility of the page via a panel.page.update hook according to the value of this checkbox field.