Update on the Workflow Initiative from Dries Buytaert
In a recent status update from Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, we’ve learned that the already released Drupal 8.2, and the upcoming release of Drupal 8.3 in April 2017, provide significant inroads to high-value features requested by content editors in the Drupal community’s latest 2016 survey, in particular, workflows.
Updates to content workflow will appear in two different ways; content save states and workflow permissions prior to content being published.
Content Save States
In the version of SiteFarm you’re already familiar with, content can be saved in two states: “Save and keep published” and “Save and unpublish.” The latest updates will introduce new options, including; “Published,” “Draft,” and “Archived."
- Published - content will be visible immediately in either your SiteFarm view (yourdept.ucdsitefarm.acsitefactory.com domain) or your live URL (yourdept.ucdavis.edu) if your site has already launched.
- Draft - content to be published later, but also to potentially be made part of a workflow.
- Archived - content that was previously published, but is now being stored off the live site for historical or legal reasons.
Workflows
Drupal 8.3 will bring with it an experimental module called Workflows, intended to provide an easy method for instituting stages of approval before your content is published to the web. Units with student workers assisting with updating web content looking for a structured means of oversight will benefit particularly from this feature. When this becomes available, the SiteFarm team will review, test, and document the steps for implementing and using this on your individual sites.
Upcoming Bonus: Workspaces / Staging of multiple content changes
Looking further ahead, Dries has also indicated a desire to fulfill another much-requested need—the ability to stage multiple pieces of content and review and publish them together at the same time.
Ideally, this would be providing users with the ability to create workflows for planned future content, like campaigns or complex updates (including images, files, content, and blocks), and then move it as a group package online. At this early date, he hopes to see this released in Drupal 8.5, which would land approximately in Q2 2018.