We're going to announce a release date along with price information for Better Workflow at the end of this week, but before we did so we thought we'd give you all a little update on where we are.

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.

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