Workbench (Moderation and Access) for basic and complex Workflows in Drupal
@beautyhammer & @tsmith512 of @fourkitchens
* with sincere apologies to Depeche Mode
Workflow:
What is it? Who needs it?
Case Studies
A tale of two cities sites:
Stanford DoR &
UTexas UPO
Fostering understanding in complex projects by going client-side
Horseshoes & hand-grenades. Making "close" count:
Overcoming gaps in requirements & capabilities
Specific challenges and solutions
The movement of documents around an organization for purposes including sign-off, evaluation, performing activities in a process and co-writing.
Workflow comes down to just two ideas: that there is work to do, which a workflow sees as opaque units of behavior; and flow, which describes what work gets done when
Contributors & Editors
The University Policy Office at The University of Texas at Austin
A new Compliance Services office,
supported by the Policy Office Advisory Group,
working closely with President's Office and Legal Services.
Diving into business logic and domain knowledge
Distilling these findings for developers
Paper-based prototypes inspired us to modify and extend Workbench for this “routing” style process.
Personification using The Jetsons characters to illustrate roles, relationships, and permissions.
Constant communication with clients about boundaries of the system, actual and anticipated.
People think like they work; UPO preferred implementation over abstraction, complete features over drafts.
Updated public site generated stakeholder “buy-in”
Experience in management of published content naturally extended to draft content.
Experience with Workbench led us to believe it was well suited to this task as well…
Workbench provides overall improvements for managing content that Drupal does not provide out of the box.
Moderation
Customizable revision and approval workflow with states between unpublished and published.
Access
Node access based on permissions and membership in a hierarchical taxonomy or menu system.
Content Producer creates new content or proposes revisions.
Content Approver with domain knowledge revises and approves.
Content Admin with University expertise publishes.
Admins have site-wide access. Approvers oversee relevant departments. Providers author in specific categories.
Research policy specialist creates a new policy.
Policy manager revises and approves.
DoR Comms Director finalizes and publishes.
Workbench did not do what we needed. But we were half-way there.
Leveraging other tools and APIs including CTOOLS, panels, contexts, taxonomy, node permissions, views, menus, and theming filled the gaps.
The creation and editing process varies widely, case-by-case.
DoR Transitions:
DoR Access Sections:
Traditional Workbench
A flow of actions
taken by users
Workbench on its side
A flow of users
who take actions
UPO Access Groups
UPO Moderation Transitions
The creation and editing process varies widely, case-by-case.
Rotate Workbench: moderate with Access, use helper nodes, use state transitions permissions to manage workflow triggers not direct workflow.
The system and the policy review process are brand new. How will users know what to do?
The system and the policy review process is brand new How will users know what to do?
Provided new Policy Dashboard that honors workflow context/multiple roles, guides users, provides portfolio management.
Needed easily managed permissions with restricted editing rights, stakeholder access through draft process, and delegation.
Recommended permission settings for Moderation posed management, security, and business challenges:
* Workbench Moderation 7.x-2.x has switched to a Ctools based permission handling.
Simplified permission management:
Needed easily managed permissions with restricted editing rights, stakeholder access through draft process, and delegation.
Custom permissions and node access augmentation, managed via terms instead of roles. Matching references on nodes permit exceptions.
“Workflow” is a generic business term for an editorial process.
Stanford DoR and Texas UPO needed a way to manage this process within their CMS.
Novel ideas and ”going client-side”
help to tackle challenges.