What is workflow?

Workflow is the movement of both information and ownership of that information through a defined process. For your website, this means controlling who performs the necessary tasks to write your content and get it published.

How does it benefit my website?

If your business has a large website with many contributors, you will need some way of managing how the content is added, decide on how it is audited and when new content is to be published. If you don’t have these controls in place, you risk having your website run out of control with bad copy and poor navigation.

What does it mean for me?

With workflow integrated into your website, you can define roles and assign them to your contributors. You can assign a member role to the people who add new content and modify existing content. You can assign an editor role to the people who check submitted content for review. You can assign a publisher role to the people who decide on where the content should reside and who has access to it.

By using workflow to manage the process of adding content, you’ll get a website with professionally managed updates that are controlled by the right people who know where the content belongs. All changes and additions must go through the process of being reviewed and published meaning that mistakes on your live site will be minimal.

With multiple editors and publishers, you can manage the site updates asynchronously. This means that scheduled releases will be unnecessary and allow for fast-track updates if needed.

Also, by combining privileges with content classification you can control where content is displayed. This means you can allocate members, editors and publishers to segregate different areas of your website.

The Workflow Process

A member may initiate the workflow process by either creating a new content item or requesting to modify an existing article. As your content management system will have full article version control, meaning that history of all changes on each article are recorded, the request to modify an existing article is performed by a check-out check-in process which effectively locks the article so no-one else can modify the article whilst checked-out.

When the member believes they have completed the article, they may assign it to the relevant editor for checking. This is the second stage of the workflow process. Ownership of the article is now the editor, and only they may modify the content.

When the editor is happy with the content, they may then assign it to the publisher. This is the third stage of the workflow process. Once the publisher is happy and has ensured that the classification of the article is correct, the publisher will check-in the article, making it free again for a member to request access to modify it.