eZ Publish Knowledge Series: Editorial workflow with Object States
Tuesday 24 March 2009 5:00:00 am
When Brad finished writing the bulk text of an Article, he needs to tell Stefan that there is some spellchecking work to do on this fresh Article. This would traditionally go through a workflow, in the eZ Publish sense of it, catching the state change and notifying the members of the Spell Checkers User Group that a new Article was submitted for spellchecking. This feature is not yet shipped by default in 4.1, but shall soon be, along with more use-cases for Object States. For now, the notification will be manual. Brad will send his new Article's URL to Stefan, right after he changed the state from “Bulk Edition” to “Spellchecking”. And so on.
Rolling out the process
Brads starts up by deciding to write about Barack Obama's fresh election as President of the United States. Logged-in in eZ Publish, he navigates to the suitable location in the content tree to write such an big piece of news, selects the Article class in the drop down list, English as a language, and hits the “Create here” button. History is being written, this is his first editorial workflow based on Object States. We all hope he is enjoying this moment. Once he is satisfied with what he wrote, he publishes the object, and changes its state to “Spellchecking”. In case Brad had chosen front-end editing ( eZ Flow here ), he can totally change the state of his article from there. When viewing the article, click the following button in the toolbar :
He lands on the following screen, where he can pursue his editor's destiny, as shown here :
He then notifies Stefan of this new Article about Obama. Stefan fixes the multiple mistakes ( Brad is bad with grammar .. ), and sets the content object in the “Media Enrichment” state. Once notified by Stefan, Mélanie populates the articles with relevant pictures, videos and interview-podcasts and finally send it to Telma, in “Translation” state. Telma, last person in the editorial process, translates the article to spanish, and sets its state to “Ready to go live”. And guess what ? The article is now online, after having completed this simplistic yet significant, multi-team editorial workflow !
Conclusion
Although the Object States feature shipped with 4.1 is at an early stage of its life, the hereby presented use-case, set up in half an hour, reveals its high potential. This example is a simple use-case for Object States. Yet a vast amount of applications and workflow-like implementations based on this new functionality can be easily implemented without further PHP coding :
- Document management with “check-in”, “check-out” (or locking) of objects, with possible overrides by a “supervisor” . Also here, an object can be marked as “locked”, while the roles/policies defined at this state to be read-only (the name does not imply the roles/policies, they must be set explicitly).
- Personal project spaces also benefit a lot, for example to implement a personal “trash-can” in eZ Publish, a dedicated object state can be assigned for this. Of course un-doing this “removed” state is straightforward with the correct roles and policies, both at the state level as well as the transitions between states. An object also retains its node location(s).
- Integration of external publishing workflows: suppose web content or part of it needs to be exported to a traditional publish/print workflow. Currently triggers can be used to launch additional workflows. In the future, a simpler system with hooks for external processes will be provided, so the need for dedicated modules and/or traditional eZ Publish workflow events can be avoided and possibly fully automated.
More to come in eZ Publish 4.2 and Thanks for reading !