It has certainly been an ‘interesting’ journey with many challenges, some of which almost broke us (Matrix support, anyone?).

It was a struggle on another level as well. As a business owner I had to constantly think about the commercial viability of the project while as a developer it was way too exciting a challenge to let go. Inspired by Leevi Graham’s talk at EECI 2010 in Leiden we did log our hours (well, most of the time) so I have a rough idea many we need to sell to break even. But right now I genuinely don’t care if we never get there, it just feels great to have created something that fills a need and that people seem to like.

We have big plans for 2012 but more about that soon. Right now, as the year draws to an end and we’re all feeling warm and fuzzy, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has helped get Better Workflow where it is.

Firstly, my invaluable colleague Rob, who has been a tireless champion of the project since day one and who made us press on when everyone else felt defeated. I can honestly say Better Workflow would have died by the roadside if it wasn’t for him.

Secondly, our Italian master Andrea Fiore who created the original prototype and is responsible for pretty much all the JavaScript in the current release.

Fellow Brightonian and EE wizard Mark Croxton has been a huge help solving problem and adding new features. It’s in no small part thanks to him we have Zenbu support.

All the third-party developers who have modified their own add-ons to make them BWF compatible; Max Lazar (MX Google Maps), Nicolas Bottari (Zenbu), Luke Wilkins (VMG Chosen Member)

And lastly Mel, my business partner, wife and mother to our beautiful 8 weeks old boy, Viggo. Thanks for not letting a little thing like having a baby slow us down.

Best wishes and see you all in 2012,

Malcolm

Better Workflow is an ExpressionEngine add-on from Electric Putty that adds inline preview, entry drafts and approval processes to the EE control panel. With Better Workflow, you will be able to work on a 'draft copy' of a live entry, preview your changes and then 'submit for approval', all without affecting the live website. When the new content has been approved and published the 'draft copy' replaces the 'entry' and the live site is updated.

For all the details, and documentation, please go to http://betterworkflow.electricputty.co.uk

We hope you like it as much as we do!

Thanks,

Rob, Malcolm, Mel
Electric Putty

It was at EECI in Leiden way back in October 2010 that the idea was born. We spent some time scoping and then devoted a couple of weeks to developing a 'proof of concept'; could this be done? Would EE let us 'bend' it's process sufficiently to do what we wanted? The answer was, well, sort of.

For the next six months we fitted in development around client work and, when we had something worth testing, ran a private beta. After we had solved all the major hurdles we started installing it on all our own client sites and watched as they really put it through it paces. We grew in confidence as the number of bug reports dwindled until we felt ready, and so we launched.

We hope you find Better Workflow a useful Add-on and we hope your client enjoy using it, our's certainly do.

For those of you interested (and because Ian Pitts, one of our Beta testers, requested it), here are the highlights form the change-log since V0.3, the first beta release.

Version 1.0

• Public release

Version 0.7

• Added Preview URL into preview modal window (Should help debug issues)

Version 0.6.9.2

• Amended preview JS to update UI correctly when a 'closed' entry is previewed

Version 0.6.9.1

• Trapped validation error when saving and previewing - now return JS alert with message (Will look to extract exact error in future)
• Changed Global Vars back to single value not array

Version 0.6.9

• Tweak to fix bug when get_settings() method was throwing an error if BWF not installed

Version 0.6.8

• Added new table to store settings on a site by site basis (No upgrade behaviour exists so will require de-installing before new code in uploaded and then re-installing)
• Squished a bug about status mapping for uppercase characters
• Added check for already updated rows in edit view to avoid double updates
• Removed deletion of auth token on first loop of channel_entries_row hook - token now deleted via ajax on preview window close

Version 0.6.5

• Trapped error when previewing a entry which fails validation
• *Hopefully* fixed IE previewing issue be replaceing attr('value',new_val) for val(new_val) in all JavaScript
• Updated settings model and view so no options are displayed if there are no channels or no templates available
• Updates to list observer
• Redirection on revert to draft now takes user back to publish form

Version 0.6

• Fixed JS bug for extracting ID from settings radio element
• Added test to ensure converting draft to entry returns a valid status
• Added status mapping to settings process
• Re-factored settings code into its own model
• Fixed bug with preview when custom cookie prefix has been set
• Fixes for javascript to add discard draft button

Version 0.5.5

• Re-factored installation process into a model
• Auth system implemented to handle cross domain previewing for MSM sites

Version 0.5

• Fix to ensure that status group exists for all sites in an MSM installation - when settings page loads model checks for existance of group, in not present it creates it
• Fix for file data mis-match post file manager upgrade
• Fixed function to retrieve Structure URL for preview
• Added method to re-instate cached data for Playa fields which was getting stripped out when we created a brand new entry via AJAX
• Updated _notify() method to use site name in subject line and webmaster email address for from address
• Fixed JavaScript bug which did not correctly update the value of the publish button after a preview of a live entry
• Added site_id for settings to make BWF MSM compatible

Version 0.4

• Log events option added to settings view
• Email notification method _notify() added to Status Transition library
• Email notifications selection drop down added to settings
• New method added to Status Transition library to get all members from set group - just need to add the email bit
• Working on EE 2.2 compatibility
• Minor 'fresh install' bugs fixed
• Playa integration not working with 'modification' to mod file
• Auto URL title population fixed

In a pretty short blog post, we are pleased to announce that Better Workflow will be hitting the digital shelves in version 1.0 on the 6th of October, 2011. It will be available through devot-ee at a special introductory price of $50/site until Christmas, and from January 1st 2012, the price will change to $65.

Support will be available through the lovely Tender application.

We'd just like to thank all the people that helped beta test the add-on, their help and suggestions were invaluable and we're excited/scared to see what the rest of the community will think. See you on the other side!

Beta testing an add-on is a fascinating way to learn how other people use EE. We'd made certain assumptions which were challenged and in the light of what we've learnt we've had to make changes and compromises, There include:

Handling custom statuses

Lots of EE developers use the status property of an entry to define something about it other that its 'state'. For example its position on the page or for building multiple navigations (especially in Structure). I have my own feelings about using status in this way, and a post on this subject is in the pipeline, never-the-less it's something we need to address.

We've had several requests to extend BWF to allow users to define custom statuses and publish entries using these. Whilst I can see this would be useful, its implementation will require a lot of thought and at the moment it's not a feature we're developing.

What we have developed however, is a status mapping feature within BWF's settings. Now when you assign a channel to use BWF it will check the status of all existing entries within that channel. If it encounters any custom statuses it will prompt you to 'map' these to a BWF status, and then on save these entries will be updated to use these statuses. You will only be able to select a preview template once all existing statuses have been mapped.

Status mapping (NB: The interface is not fully styled in the below screen grab)

Structure compatibility

There is an issue when a user creates a brand new entry on a channel which is Structure managed and clicks 'Save and preview' before the entry is submitted for a full save. In this scenario BWF's preview engine is triggered as normal, it creates the new entry and then looks to see if a Structure URL exists to use for the preview. At this point in time Structure's own code has not been evoked so no URL exists and BWF falls back on the template specified in the settings for the preview. Depending on how the template is set up this may return an imperfect preview.

We have opted not to try and interact with Structure during the 'Save and Preview' process; as a general policy we want to interact with other third party add-ons as little as possible.

This issue only effects these entries before they are submitted for a full save. Mark Croxton from Hall Mark Designs has been an invaluable beta tester and has made many code suggestions which have been rolled into the current version. He has been working on a site and has encountered this exact issue and opted to bypass the problem by disabling preview for Structure managed channels until an entry has been fully saved once. We have considered doing this, or possibly allowing users to specify this behavior in the settings, but at present have left things as they are. As long as the preview template works with a standard /template_group/template/entry_id url structure the entry's content will get rendered.

Conclusions from beta testing

Overall we're really pleased with the feedback from the two rounds of beta testing. We've had a few people really put BWF through it paces and its held its own. Amazingly we've had no reports of problems with our Matrix or Playa compatibility which either means it's perfect or everyone's been too gentle. In any case we feel confident that we're ready to go.

Internally we have deployed BWF onto four websites and bar a few little issues with date formats have been thrilled with the results. Most encouraging of all is the feedback we've had from those clients who have been using EE for a while without it who tell us how much it has changed their experience of managing their websites. This is exactly what we wanted to achieve and why we set about developing this Add-on, real users on real websites achieving more; a better workflow.

You have a channel with lots of fields. You've spent ages making a beautiful custom publish layout for your client to make their life easy. You've separated your fields across multiple tabs and everything looks great. Your client then creates a new entry and leaves a required field empty. EE captures the error and adds a warning, but the field is on the second tab and the client can't see it. They have no way of knowing there is a problem; they don't even know the entry hasn't been saved.

The solution:

Mega Error from Electric Putty is a free Expressionengine Accessory available for EE2.x which will look across all tabs within a publish layout for errors and flag them up in a way no one will miss.

The multi-tab publish view

The main error message

In tab error messages

Usage

Copy the folders to their relevant locations and configure the accessory for your desired needs in the addons->accessories area. That's it!

So, we've been slaving away on Better Workflow for quite some time now, and we're thinking, "hey you out there, you with the face, want to test it?" So do you?

We're looking for people who can really put our add-on through its paces, who have clients who really have a need for this, and will be utilising things like the email notifications, the preview, the submission/approval process features and hopefully catch any bugs we've missed so that we can release a rock-solid product to you all as soon as possible.

If you think this sounds like something you're interested in, please fill out our beta request form below. If you're successful we'll send you an invite as soon as possible and you can get stuck in!

Please note: Better Workflow requires the latest version of EE for greatest compatibility, and if you're using Structure/Playa/Matrix/Wygwam, we advise you to upgrade them too, if required. We would be interested to hear any feedback on previous versions too though!

We're looking forward to seeing him, and everyone else who is attending, in Manchester at the end of August.

Best wishes,

The Electric Putty Team

We sized it up from several different angles and had a good root around under the bonnet (that's hood to our American friends). There's some super fly code in there but unfortunately not a hook in sight and without one there's simply no way to generate a preview.

Messing with other people's code is never ideal, but right now it's the only way to get Better Workflow to play nicely with Playa.

Taking the principle of the existing and super handy matrix_data_query hook, which gives you the opportunity to alter the data sent to the template, we have rolled our own equivalent for Playa and dropped it into the _fetch_rels() method at line 409 of mod.playa.php.

The implementation looks like this:

It's not the most efficient code ever created as you have to run the original query even if you then go off any get your data from somewhere else, but we wanted to make the smallest change possible to the add-on.