Content Workflows

Content often has to be reviewed and approved before publishing. Much like with print, editors perform reviews, request changes, or authorize content for publishing. Drupal offers a feature that allows content to go through a workflow before publishing. Leveraging roles and permissions, Drupal can customize workflows for various users during an editorial process.

In this chapter we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Configuring workflows
• Using workflows

Configuring workflows

Content workflows in Drupal have two different modules relevant to configuration:

• Content moderation, which offers additional publication states for content
• Workflows, which manage state, transitions, and corresponding workflows

This section explores how those modules are configured to deliver workflows tied to Drupal content. It is broken down into subsections on the configuration needed to manage states, transitions, and workflows and with the user permissions required to grant specific roles.

Managing states

Workflows help define different states of content. Consider the different states of an article. A writer drafts content. An editor reviews the draft, may perform some editorial corrections, and approves or rejects it for publishing. The authored content may come in different states. This could be a draft state or an approved/published state, or it might get sent back to draft if it’s rejected.

Managing transitions

Transitions...

Using workflows

Workflow features are incorporated into Drupal’s standard content management capabilities. The community has contributed additional capabilities that can be added on. Some examples include the Scheduler module (https://www.drupal.org/project/scheduler), which integrates time-related events with the Content Moderation module, a bulk publishing module for use within Content Moderation (https://www.drupal.org/project/moderated_content_bulk_publish), and a notifications module also tied to Content Moderation (https://www.drupal.org/project/content_moderation_notifications). The following section highlights the usage of out-of-the-box content workflow features in Drupal only.

The main content listing has a new Moderated content tab for viewing workflow states within the content. It is found at admin/content/moderated and is shown in the following figure:

Figure 16.5 – Content overview for the Moderated content tab

This listing...

Use case

Suppose a public company has regulatory compliance, requires all earning reports to go through a review, and has a specific publishing date. This example assumes the Content Moderation, Workflows, and Scheduler modules are enabled. The following steps can be done to configure this use case:

1. Create an earnings report content type with any file fields configured to use the private filesystem from admin/structure/types/add
2. Configure the earnings report content type to use the scheduler by enabling the checkbox Enable scheduled publishing for content items under the Scheduling tab when configuring the content type.
3. Add a new regulatory workflow of type “content moderation” at admin/config/workflow/workflows with at least draft and published states and at least one transition from draft to publish.
4. Select the earnings report content type when configuring the regulatory workflow.
5. Create a role for the regulatory governing users.
6. Assign relevant...

Summary

Workflows allow for content to go through editorial processes. By harnessing Drupal’s native users, roles, and permissions, site builders can configure states and transitions and control actions for each user, which can be applied to content entities and bundles. Like editorial processes for print, Drupal offers various checks done by different users before the content is published.

The next chapter explores advanced topics in Git, Drush, Composer, and DevOps that developers and operators should understand.