Moderation modules, working drafts and revisions
Development and Programming
Hi all,
We (the place where I work) are pretty new to EE, so far to be honest its been disappointing to develop on (compared to plain CI!) but after quite a few late nights we are down to the last bit of big functionality!
Has anyone had any luck implementing a proper workflow solution in EE 2.2.2?
The lack of a working draft is a real killer for us (that fact it is not included in the EE core is shocking!) and although we have a 5 level moderation process in place by modifying the NSM publish plus: workflow add on we cannot get a working draft in place at at all.
The main issue is that everytime you do anything with a piece of content in EE it saves it directly in the db as live content. If you are editing a piece of content and you need authorisation this causes a pretty big problem because live content suddenly becomes unavailable as soon as someone without the correct rights edits the content.
To solve this issue we attempted to tweek the revision functionality so content is always stored as a revision when set to anything else than “published” and the live data table is updated only when the admin sets the content to “published”.
This would have been fine although the publish plus add-on only works on entry ID and changes the status based on the selected state.
We investigated the version table next as if we could get the related version to the entry id we could do a bit of modifying and implement a fix to stop content from automatically removing itself from the site. This would have been achieved by updating a revision state and only updating the live state once the moderation process had been completed.
If anyone has any knowledge of the revision / live database update functionality / structure it would be really useful to know how the two relate. I fear that revisions are simply a audit trail and the loaded revision is stored as the live data
Otherwise the only other option would be to add the better workflow module and try to extend the moderation levels…..which looks like a nightmare.
Any suggestions or thoughts would be awesome!
Thanks!
I’m not sure I understand your question. With Publish Plus (for 1.x), if you save a draft, those changes aren’t pushed publicly. If you save a revision, they are.
I haven’t delved into Better Workflow yet, but agree that an editorial control system is vital.
Hi Dylan, thanks for replying!
I believe with publish plus in EE 1x there is working draft functionality available it just hasn’t been ported to EE 2x yet.
To get round this we tried to tweek the revisions database table so you could update content which would only save as a revision on submit. Once you had reached the published workflow state the revision would be set as the live content.
Its frustrating because essentially everything is there to do a live draft (revisions, custom statuses etc) but it doesn’t quite tie together due to relations not being available in the database.
So I guess my question is:
Has anyone other than better workflow (which looks great but would require a lot of hacking around to perform to our client’s spec) managed to create live drafts in EE 2x?
Thanks, Phill