Sometimes content needs to go through several approvers before being published. For example, a page detailing the ins and outs of council rates needs to be reviewed by your team leader for accuracy before going to the communications team to be published. In this scenario, you can set up a multi-stage workflow to ensure any initial edits are made before the final review.
A content type will go through each workflow that has the content type selected before being published. Pages will go through the workflows in the order they are listed under More > Workflow > Content [Approval/Deletion] stages. To set up a multi-stage workflow, you simply need to create several workflows that specify the same content type.
The complexity comes with choosing the correct approvers for each stage. There are several moving parts to this:
- Assigning the correct roles to your approvers. Workflow approvers are based on roles, and once you have selected the approver role, you can choose default approvers from the list of Internal approvers. Creating and assigning custom roles is helpful, as you can make them highly specific and assign them to only a few users.
- Following the example above, in the first workflow stage, you want to ensure that approver selection is enabled so that content authors can select their team leader from the user list when submitting a page to the workflow. This will streamline the process, as the team leader will be notified and can review the content for accuracy.
- In the second workflow stage, you can disable approver selection and set up your approver list so that the page goes through the communications team, and anyone on that team can review and approve the content. As the purpose of this workflow stage is merely to ensure the page is proofread and internet-ready, it can go through anyone on that team.
- The last aspect is to train your staff on the workflow process thoroughly. In the scenario outlined here, this may include training content authors to submit content to the correct supervisor, training team leaders on how to preview and comment on pages and what they need to review, and training the communications team on what they need to check before publishing the content.
The good news is that once a workflow is set up correctly, you only need to worry about assigning the correct roles to new staff. We recommend testing your workflows after creating them to ensure the correct people review the correct content and your pages do not undergo unnecessary workflow stages.