Thread

Derek had suggested a possible way to achieve this on weblogs by using custom statuses, following out of a related thread for forms, which is here.

What I want is to have a group of Contributors, who can submit postings for a weblog or other content.  Then group Editors and above can publish the postings after having a look.

I’ve set a custom status of ‘submit’, and given it to Contributors.  This mostly does just as it says, replacing their button in Publish with Submit, with the posting entered but not Open yet.

This is great, and just what I wanted…save for a few issues.

- though there is a status of Submit, Submitting doesn’t set it—the post is actually marked Closed.

- more seriously, once the post has been approved by being marked Open by someone privileged, it shows fine at first.  But if the originator Edits it, either with Quick Save or Update, the post status goes to Closed, and of course this makes it disappear from the site.  As well, being marked Closed, there’s not attention to an Editor.

The first sounds like a small bug on custom statuses. 

The second feels to me a combination of this, and a particular loop of thinking I went through myself before trying the method, which was about how to monitor Contributors changing what they wrote after it was approved.

I guess I would propose the following:

- to set the actual custom status on submit ought to be fixed, unless it is something I missed in setup, in which case apologies.

- I guess there ought to be two possibilities for any member control:

—trusted site, in which case contributors are allowed to update their posts once published.

—cautious site, in which something restrictive ought to be done. 

  In an ideal world, and probably coming future, we would have more involved versioning on posts, in a way that could leave the approved up while a second editorial cycle went through on an updated but offline copy.

  For the present, I’m kind of thinking that preventing the Contributor from making changes, once Published, would be more friendly than zapping the post to Closed if he tries. 

  And, I am thinking that both models, trusted site, and cautious site, ought to be settable by Admin CP configuration on the weblog level.

Best I can think of on a Sunday when the sunshine tells me better than to be working, but it’s kind of pleasant with ExpressionEngine anyway, if has to be.  And a nice early evening looked forward to.

Thanks again, Derek, and hope some of this might bear on the forum edit cycle proposals as well.

Regards,
Clive

Hm- for the first bit- if you go to the weblog(s) in question via ‘Admin- Site Admin’ for each weblog, and in ‘Administrative Prefs’ set the default status to ‘Submit’, it should default to that.  (If submit isn’t an option there- make sure that the weblog is assigned to the custom status group that has ‘submit’ as an option.)

The second part is more difficult- take a look at this FR for workflow with live articles- I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what you’re looking for.  I haven’t come up with (or seen) a really great way to do it yet.  But the thread is a good one for kicking around some ideas.  And I’d add your support to the FR there as well!

Make sense?

Robin, thank you.  I had just run across the default setting, look for something else, and with your advice, got this and the dropdown order set right.

With this, I have the ‘cautious’ model of an edit workflow, with Contributors and Editors, and that is great, will get me through the first needs.

Now, I read through the FR thread, and thought about it.

I think they are asking for what I want in the ‘trusted’ model, as I would like to run it actually on my site/s.

As an architect will understand, this is quite a bit more involved than is being discussed; it surely will not be a patch re-use of the present Editor revisions, even though it may appear to be similar in appearance.  You have to have a stable base, and you have to work out and support all the use pathways, which are a bit involved.

Important, since no-one is going to appreciate losing their post update at a critical time, which is when they are most likely to do one.

So, I will think of how to support that FR, and thanks for pointing me to it.

Hope you got a good amount of time to yourself on this Sunday, especially in the middle of the 1.6 hot time, and quite appreciate the energy for a peruse that got my quest answered.

Regards,
Clive

Hm- for the first bit- if you go to the weblog(s) in question via ‘Admin- Site Admin’ for each weblog, and in ‘Administrative Prefs’ set the default status to ‘Submit’, it should default to that.  (If submit isn’t an option there- make sure that the weblog is assigned to the custom status group that has ‘submit’ as an option.)

The second part is more difficult- take a look at this FR for workflow with live articles- I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what you’re looking for.  I haven’t come up with (or seen) a really great way to do it yet.  But the thread is a good one for kicking around some ideas.  And I’d add your support to the FR there as well!

Make sense?