Site Building

Spotlight: Workbench Moderation for Drupal 7

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This tutorial covers a topic in Drupal 7 which may or may not be the version you're using. We're keeping this tutorial online as a courtesy to users of Drupal 7, but we consider it archived.

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We have half of our editorial process in place. Existing editorial groups can now edit content they are responsible for, and only that content. However, to enable editors to effectively manage the flow of articles coming in, we need something else: an editorial workflow system that allows them to easily determine when an article is ready for review, and to either send it back to the reporter when it needs more work, or to publish it on the site when it’s good to go.

Out of the box, Drupal allows a piece of content to be either published or unpublished. When the “published” checkbox is unchecked on the node editing form, only users with the “administer nodes” permission are allowed to view the content. That’s enough for some sites, but it doesn’t give our reporters and editors as much control as they need. For example, there’s no way for a reporter to mark an article as an in-progress draft and come back to it later. In addition, there’s no easy way for an editor to tell a reporter that an article needs more work—the editor must contact the author manually.

In this lesson, we'll get an overview of how the Workbench Moderation module can do this for us. We'll look at Workbench states and transitions, and how we use these to moderate our content.

Additional resources

Using Drupal, 2nd edition

Using Drupal source code

Drupalize.Me Guide: Using Drupal Book by O'Reilly Media