Improvement to workflow logic - object validation feature

Thursday 11 March 2004 4:09:52 am

Hi all,

This issue has been discussed in a couple of other threads, but I thought to start a new one to present my ideas for a solution. I understand the guys at eZ have been fiddling with this for some time, and I've also talked a bit with Bård about it as it is something we do need for our site. But haven't seen concretely any proposals on how to do it, so I thought I'd put my idea forward and see what others think.
We're willing to pay for development on this but hope others might want to join in, at least with ideas on how to do it.

Our key desire: More managable collaboration feature, allow various users to work with drafts of objects.

This solution would partly or completely address the following issues:
· Workflows with more than two users - http://www.ez.no/community/forum/general/approval_workflow_whit_more_than_2_actors
· Group as editor/approving person - http://www.ez.no/community/forum/suggestions/wish_workflow_event_approve and http://www.ez.no/community/forum/setup_design/approval_by_others_users_than_administrator_user_a_group_of_user
· Allow editors to edit article before approval, ie real collaboration as well as review of eg. guestbook submissions before they display to users.
· Correct placement of draft article before publishing and allowing other editors to see. Even if a person can publish directly to the node.
· Unpublishing - http://www.ez.no/community/forum/general/unpublish_event_in_ez_3_3_missing

To achieve this I had the following ideas:
1. New optional overall feature called validation. Can be set for a node to say if child objects require validation or not. All objects can then be set as validated or not under the current node.
2. In user configuration an option to say if user is allowed to validate (in node, for class etc).
3. If a user is allowed to publish but not validate the object is sent to those who can validate (maybe have an option to specifiy what users validate in those cases). That comes in their collaboration box, but when they enter to edit they edit under the appropriate node.
4. Related to 3., have option for user to see a list of those who can validate and specify whom to ask for validation.
5. Allow 4 also for those who are allowed to validate, to provide for collaboration. Ie send article to next person who should edit before it's validated.
6. Users can see their own unvalidated articles (optional), those who can validate can see all unvalidated.
7. Setup for: can validated own, can validate all
8. For articles that should not temporarily display one can just unvalidate.

Best regards,

Kjell Knudsen
http://www.icbl.org (eZ version coming in a couple of months)

Kjell Knudsen
http://www.icbl.org

Wednesday 11 August 2004 10:27:33 am

Not much I'm afraid. Workflows and other collaboration features will be addressed after 3.5

We implemented some pseudo workflow stuff, sometimes (but mostly not) coupled to the notification system. Some boolean flags in the classes are used to hide/show (read "publish") objects.

Collaboration features are really the weakest part in eZ publish, at least when you need something more than a simple workflow.

-paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Thursday 12 August 2004 8:13:36 am

That's excellent news.

Do you see this as being, like, a 3.4.2 or a 3.4.3 type of thing at this stage?

Wednesday 03 November 2004 4:47:10 pm

Any updates on this? Is it going to be integrated in 3.5?

Wednesday 21 March 2007 1:25:06 pm

Hi,

I found this topic by searching a solution to add a validation workflow for only one class, because I'm on a 3.8.6 version, and the validation workflow can just be defined for a section, and in my section I want to validate articles but not comments.

Is there anyway to do this ?

thanks in advance !

eZ Publish Freelance
web : http://www.webaxis.fr