Thread

Is there a way for a content contributor to add content (e.g. a new press release) via the control panel that must be approved by a higher level user? And then, once that higher level user approves the content, it goes live on the site? Is there anything of this nature and/or anything like a hierarchical content publishing process?

The most common way to do this is through an entry status workflow =)

Hi Lisa

The Entry Status work great, but can EE handle the following:

* Marketing Assistant (within the Member Group “Marketing”) adds a news item, status defaults to Pending
* Marketing Manager (within the Member Group “Super Admins”) approves, and therefore changes Status to “Open”
* Marketing Assistant then needs to edit the news item, so makes the changes, and awaits for Marketing Manager to approve
* In the meantime, the ORIGINAL article still appears on site
* Marketing Manager approves changes, which are now reflected on the site

From what I’ve seen, an edit by a non-super admin would revert the status to “pending”, and therefore remove it from the site. Can EE handle the slightly more complex workflow above (which is more of a mash-up between status and revision histories)? Also, can EE email a Super Admin when content has been added/edited that needs to be approved?

TIA
Phil

Hi, Phil—

This comes up occasionally on the forums.  ExpressionEngine can handle all of the items you have mentioned except for the editing part.  You have a few options there - you could use a combination of custom fields, one to hold the edits, and one to hold the status of the edits.  You would need to pre-determine how many edits are possible.  If I were to do this, I would just go with the main live article and one edit, and then rotate through them for later edits.  With a custom field for “edit is live”.  The problem here is that you would need some way to restrict who can see the custom field status and have a default for it - or creatively use edits to get around this, with one for “edit in progress” or some such.

In short, this can be done, but it may need some custom development, in the form of an extension, to help it along.  It depends on your exact needs.

You can control what member groups can access which statuses out of the box, as well. =)

Thanks for that Lisa. Is this more advance status/revision history something that’ll make its way into ExpressionEngine 2?

Hi, Phil - we don’t tend to give hints or information what features may be upcoming.  You can read our policy on that here =)