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Hi guys,

Just a quick note to let you know we’ve released our add-on Better Workflow. Here’s the overview:

Better Workflow is an ExpressionEngine add-on from Electric Putty that adds inline preview, entry drafts and approval processes to the EE control panel. With Better Workflow, you will be able to work on a ‘draft copy’ of a live entry, preview your changes and then ‘submit for approval’, all without affecting the live website. When the new content has been approved and published the ‘draft copy’ replaces the ‘entry’ and the live site is updated.

See more, including full documentation at the Better Workflow website.

We’re currently retailing (through devot-ee) at a discounted price of $50 until January 2012.

Hope you enjoy it!

Rob

I can finally consider moving to EE 2.x.

Haha, awesome Dylan! Let us know what you think if you do make the leap 😉

Thanks,

Rob

Looks like a must have for a group blog or news, site. Debating getting it for my own blog just for the live preview.

This looks incredible. An excellent, much-needed, and long-anticipated addition to the core. I look forward to trying this out on our next project.

Haha, awesome Dylan! Let us know what you think if you do make the leap 😉

As a bootstrapped nonprofit, we don’t exactly have the budget for all the add-ons we’d need at the moment. But with a editorial workflow offering, we can finally start planning, at least.

Rob, this looks fantastic. Previewing not being in the core is the single greatest flaw of EE in my opinion. I could see us using this on all our projects however right now it looks like some plugins we use occasionally like Channel Images aren’t supported. Sorry if you have it described somewhere, but if a plugin isn’t supported what exactly does that mean? Does Better Workflow not work at all or do the supported plugins still draft/preview?

Hi err.. Caddisint!

Thanks for the compliment 😊 We’ve not had a chance to try Channel Images with BWF, but the usual behaviour is that the ‘live draft’ preview will not show any modified data for that field, instead reverting back to the ‘live’ entry’s data. This is because a lot of third-party add-ons store their data in a separate table, and unless we specifically write support for it, we can’t save a ‘draft copy’ of their data.

We are looking at proposing a feature that would make it easy for third party developers to add support for our add-on, so that we could increase our base of supported add-ons, but I’m not sure how far down the line that is.

We’d love to hear what you think of it, if you do try it out.

Thanks,

Rob

Rob,

Great job with Better Workflow.  I have a question/suggestion:

For large content sites with multiple editors, would it be possible to show the specific changes to the content within draft that is waiting for approval?

Ex:  Show the pending changes in color, italics, bold, etc. 

This way the admin can view exactly what has been changed, and this will prevent editors from sneaking in changes that are not noticed by the admin. 

Let me know if this is possible, if not, I think this would be a major benefit. Also, our team would gladly contribute to coding/integrating this feature if you are able to get it out within the next few months. 

Let us know!

Thanks,

Brandon

quick questions…when a draft is pending approval are email notifications sent to admin? thanks.

Hi Brandon,

Interesting idea, we’ve just released version 1.1 today. We’ll give it a think for our future development plans and get back to you.

Adam,

When a draft is pending approval an email is sent to all members of the member group you specify in the Better Workflow options.

Thanks,

Rob

Rob,

Thanks much for the quick reply. Sounds like a great extension and we’re going to use it in an upcoming project.

Cheers,
Adam

Hi All,

Just to keep you all up to date. We’ve implemented a third-party compatibility API into the latest beta of Better Workflow: http://betterworkflow.electricputty.co.uk/api.html

We’re currently working with a big player in the Add-on world to iron out the creases and hope to have this version available soon.

Fingers crossed we’ll see our list of compatible Add-ons grow pretty quickly.

Malcolm

Brilliant!

great job 😊 i looked more about this ad-on and seems great to me.