Thread

Hi everyone,

We use a custom CMS for some projects.  One of the features of our system is that we have a staging.site.com and a http://www.site.com, and using the admin system, we can edit pages or content and save the updates as ‘draft’ and after it’s approved, we save the same update as ‘published’. And if the user goes to the staging site he will get the draft articles, if he goes to the live site he will get the published articles.

Both sites use the same database, different folders and files (which gives us some freedom to change code or update templates when needed) and it simplifies the process of keeping an ‘under development’ content or add the ‘authorization’ process. 

Any idea of how can we use EE with this workflow?

My theory is that multi-site could be tweaked to work with this… Using the same basic templates and channels but when it comes to states is either ‘draft’ or ‘published’ so not sure if it could work.

Thanks for your time.

I would guess that MSM could probably be used given that it can share channels across sites, but your templates would require different tag parameters to show the content on the two sites.

That’s an overly expensive workflow for EE if you ask me though - $299 for EE and $199 for MSM just to split the content for one production site?

I would suggest (if I’ve undertsood the original post correctly), that you set the default status for channel entries to ‘Closed’ (or even create a status group that includes a draft option) and then just filter the closed entries in admin for approval. Once approved, or set to open, they will then appear in the site.

As an extreme solution you could set up some templates that are restricted to certain user groups that have entries tags that pull through closed content - but it seems like overkill given that you can read all content in the admin screens?

Thanks Gordon,
I agree with you about the cost.  The main goal was to provide a quick access to review site content for users who are not that familiar with CMS in general.

Also, using different sites with our custom CMS gives us the opportunity of changing some layout options together with updated content for the same page, get approval from the client and update the live site.

We have some time to explore ideas, because this was a request for a future project.  I will test some of your suggestions just to see how complicated or overkill may be.

Thanks!

Sounds like you may be looking for: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/better-workflow

Thanks Kurt,

Will take a look… Also, found this post (quite old) with similar workflow as ours:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/170304/

Not definite answer, but is interesting that someone else was doing the same.