[Plugin: Custom Post Type UI] Custom Post Types being saved as draft by default

Did you enter anything other than ‘post’ in Custom Post Type UI -> Manage Custom Post Types -> Edit (your custom type) -> Advanced Options -> Capability Type?

Note: If you entered something else, it will be saved in database but still show ‘post’ because of a bug in current version of Custom Post Type UI.

To inherit the rights of ‘post’, make sure that you enter ‘post’ there and save again.

1. Is your user the owner of the ‘topic’ post?

2. How do you grant ‘ability to edit and publish posts’ rights to your contributors? With a plugin? Or with add_cap()?

The contributor role permissions look ok, it should work like this, but I am not familiar with how User Role Editor sets the permissions internally.

I have a similar setup on one of my sites, but I do not use a plugin for the roles, I have this in my functions.php and contributors can publish posts in my custom post types.

$role = get_role('contributor');
if ($role !== NULL) {
	if (!$role->has_cap('upload_files'))  $role->add_cap('upload_files');
	if (!$role->has_cap('publish_posts')) $role->add_cap('publish_posts');
	if (!$role->has_cap('edit_published_posts')) $role->add_cap('edit_published_posts');
}

Note: If you re-enable the User Role Editor, don’t forget to delete the code in functions.php

As I wrote before, it could be some issue with the “Capability Type”, to check this, I would add another fresh custom post type, just for testing.

Or maybe you have some other plugin which causes the behaviour.