Drupal Learning Journal 7. “Using Drupal” – Chapter 6 – Workflow

The authors of Using Drupal explained how Workflows can be managed in Drupal. Just like with the wiki, I don’t see any immediate practical use of this feature, as none of the projects I am workig on (or thinking about doing) requiers it. But it is certainly a legitimate need for many websites that are managed by team to have a publishing workflow in place to nesure that only quality content makes it to the public site. Here is what I learned.

• The Workflow module allows administrators to define custom publishing states for content, e.g. in review, ready for publication. (page 209) It doesn’t have a Drupal 7 version, although there are some conversations about it. Maestro is a workflow module that exists for Drupal 7, but not very widespread yet.
• The Views Bulk Operations module allows “bulk operations to be executed on the nodes displayed by a view. It does so by showing a checkbox in front of each node, and adding a select box containing operations that can be applied on the selected nodes.” (page 209) Drupal 7 version is under development. (This will be useful for the e-commerce site I am building, to update products in bulk.)
• The Flag module allows “you to choose actions that should run when very specific things occur, e.g. a node being flagged more than five times by different users. More flexible and customizable than the Trigger module.” (page 211) Drupal 7 version is in beta. Trigger is part of core.
• The Rules module is “designed to duplicate the functionality of the Trigger module, with the addition of conditional rules that are checked before any actions fire.” (page 211) Drupal 7 version is in alpha.
• The Workspace module “gives each user his own personal page that lists the nodes and comments and files he’s posted to the site.” (page 225) No Drupal 7 version and I didn’t find any plans for it either. 🙁
• Additional useful modules are listed on page 230:
  – Workflow fields allowing CCK node fields to be made invisible or read-only depending on the current workflow state. (No drupal 7 version.)
  – The functionality of the abandoned Workflow Graph module, mentioned in the book has been  incorporated into Graphviz Filter module, that creates “graphs dynamically from within Drupal nodes.”(No drupal 7 version.)
  – The Nodequeue module “allows users to collect nodes in an arbitrarily ordered list. The order in the list can be used for a any purpose.” (Version for Drupal 7 is in alpha.)