[Drupal] Workflows

Mon Apr 28 10:17:32 EDT 2014

Robert,
    I think you’re on the right track with this.  I’ve reviewed our own set of roles, permissions, and group roles.  My comments are below.

I think your roles of Author, Editor, and Approver are fine and can be enforced with permissions and Workbench.  The concern about branding:  Couldn’t that be handled at the theme layer?  What would content editors would touch with branding, anyway?

We’re rolling out a new Drupal instance in June, which will have the largest user base of any of the Drupal sites we have done thus far.  We have created three roles in addition to administrator:  Content Admin, Group Admin, and Group Member.  These would be very close to your Approver, Editor, and Author, respectively.  Content Admins can do almost everything in the workflow except delete content.  Content Admins and Group Admins can send content from Draft to Needs Review to Published and back.  Group Members can only promote content from Draft to Needs Review and back again.

Within Organic Groups, we have also established permissions that allow Group Members (similar to your Author role) to share editing rights to pages that have been assigned to that specific group.  Within Groups there are two roles, Content-Owner and Content-Editor.  Content-Owners can create new basic pages (and then assign that page to one of their groups).  Content-Editors can only edit pages in their group.

This workflow requires careful set-up at the outset.  New content must be assigned to one or more groups when it is created if it is to be edited by group members. New users, when added to the system, must be assigned, at a minimum, the role of group-member and then also added to whichever content groups they need to belong to, with whichever group role within that group is appropriate.  This all sounds great on paper, but we’ll find out if it’s feasible once the site is live and changes need to be made to certain pages “right now”.

If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty of permissions, I can share the whole list with you off-llist.  Hope this helps.

— Pat

From: <Walker>, "Robert T." <walker.45 at osu.edu<mailto:walker.45 at osu.edu>>
Reply-To: Drupal users list <drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 12:53 PM
To: Drupal users list <drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Drupal] Workflows

I should have stated that we’ve started to use Workbench and Workbench Moderation to implement workflows.

What I’m looking for is less which modules to use, and more of which roles and states make sense for what we’re trying to accomplish.

Thanks,
Rob

From: drupal-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:drupal-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu> [mailto:drupal-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] On Behalf Of Witney, Ernest
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 10:31 AM
To: Drupal users list
Subject: Re: [Drupal] Workflows

You may also want to look at Drupal Content Access Module. It allows you to tweak permissions in all sorts of ways.

“This module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows you to specifiy custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you can enable per content access settings, so you can customize the access for each content node."

https://drupal.org/project/content_access

It can be used in combination with Workbench which is great for staging and moderating posts

-Bud

On Apr 23, 2014, at 9:45 AM, Leonard, Patrick G. <leonard.56 at osu.edu<mailto:leonard.56 at osu.edu>> wrote:

Robert,
      Roles and permissions can take care a lot of this for you.  Also Workbench (https://drupal.org/project/workbench) and Workbench Moderation (https://drupal.org/project/workbench_moderation) can handle your workflow.  Organic Groups (https://drupal.org/project/og) can be used for the finer-grained content assignment and sharing.

Pat

From: <Walker>, "Robert T." <walker.45 at osu.edu<mailto:walker.45 at osu.edu>>
Reply-To: Drupal users list <drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 9:01 AM
To: "drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>" <drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:drupal at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>>
Subject: [Drupal] Workflows

Good morning!

In preparation for moving from a custom CMS with no workflows (all users can publish their own work) to Drupal, I’d like to get everyone’s take on workflows, not necessarily limited to Drupal but for any CMS.

We currently have 80 total CMS users with each office, department or center with one or more users.

The three things we’d like to accomplish with workflows:
·         Allow non-technical users to provide content but get it reviewed before publishing
·         Notify stakeholders (supervisors) of content changes
·         Ensure correct branding from a marketing perspective

In our brainstorming sessions, here’s the workflow we’ve come up with:

Author (non-technical user); cannot publish content on their own
·         Can create new drafts of content
·         Can change content status to Needs Reviewed which sends the content to an Editor for review

Editor (a well-trained CMS user); can publish content
·         Can create new drafts of content
·         Can change content status to Published
o   Publish Author changes
o   Publish their own changes
·         Can change content status to Needs Approved which sends the content to an Approver for review

Approver (a non-technical supervisor to the Editor); can approve content and optionally publish
·         Can change content status to Needs Work which sends the content back to the Editor
·         Can change content status to Published

The idea is that most of our current CMS users would be Editors for their area in Drupal and able to publish their own changes. Editors would be well-trained to recognize proper branding. Authors could be others in their office that contribute content but it would need to be reviewed by an Editor before the Editor published it (or sent back to the Author for changes). The Editor role can also send content to an Approver for review if it is high-visibility content (like a department landing page

One feature that we’d like that we haven’t seen yet in a module is the ability to assign content to a user. A use case would be that if two users are collaborating on content, they could be able to pass it back and forth.

What do you think? Is there a better workflow that can accomplish our needs? Do we need more than one workflow?

Thanks,
Rob

<image001.png>
Robert Walker
Web Application Developer
Information Technology Services
320F Mason Hall, 250 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, OH 43210
614-247-5477 Office
walker.45 at fisher.osu.edu<mailto:walker.45 at fisher.osu.edu>fisher.osu.edu<http://fisher.osu.edu/>

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