Better Workflow Demo @ London EE Meetup
We demo'ed Better Workflow at the London EE Meetup last night. Thankfully we had no technological breakdowns and, aside from one (small) glitch, our Add-on behaved perfectly.
The post demo discussion was very interesting and we've come away with lots of ideas as to how we could improve Better Workflow.
One issue discussed was around notification; our initial concept was that this would be an automatic process where all members with publishing access to a given channel would be emailed when an entry was submitted for approval. It seems like this may be too blunt a tool for some users and perhaps some sort of notification management may be required. This could be as simple as selecting recipients from a list or as complex as a email client type interface, where you could manually add addresses and enter a custom message. We'd love to know what the wider community thinks and how useful this type of feature would be.
We also discussed the previewing behaviour. Currently there is a one-to-one relationship between a channel and the template you use to preview it. @johndwells showed us how using Leevi Graham's Live-look it is possible to assign multiple templates to a channel and toggle through these to see how the entry would look in different templates. Again, we'd love to hear whether this would be a useful addition.
@stephenpratley mentioned that he could see Better Worflow being used, not so much for approval purposes, but for sense-checking within certain organisation. He gave the example of his own company, @shinemarketing, where he imagined writing a new entry then submitting it for approval just so someone else in the office (or indeed outside it) could check it over, correct any typos and the publish it.
Many thanks to @gradualist and @simoncox for organising the meetup, we're looking forward to the next one.
Here are the slides from the presentation we gave. They pretty much cover the same ground as the previous post, but there is a diagram of the workflow which might be of some interest.
4 comments
Emily Heath
Thanks for your presentation Malcolm and the contributions from your team at the meetup.
Your add-on sounds great - I hadn’t even realised how much I need that functionality until you showed it. I’m pitching for a job right now for an architects’ firm which will definitely need to have this publishing workflow - I hope if we win the job that you get BWF out in time!
I know you specifically mentioned that you won’t be supporting Matrix or WYSIWYG content at first but I just wanted to put in a request that you put these high up on the road map of development.
The other limitation you mentioned was that you wouldn’t be able to filter by the ‘submitted for approval’ status. This isn’t such a biggy but I hope you’ll be able to figure something out for managing that at some point.
Cheers, Emily aka Gradualist
John Macpherson
Workflow is sorely needed for EE2, look forward to testing this out.
Dylan Smith
EE2 has been pretty much useless to me without some sort of replacement for Publish Plus. This looks like an interesting move.
Being able to use Matrix content is a must, and showing workflow status on the edit list page is important, too.
Tony Sabo
Hi There-
Is your great new add-on ready for release yet? If not how long out are you thinking?
Can’t wait.
Thanks,
Tony