This page last changed on Oct 24, 2005 by jnolen.

This page describes the details of an approval workflow.

  • Users may be members of an 'author' group which is allowed to edit pages, an 'approver' group which is allowed to approve edited pages, or both groups (in which case they can't approve their own changes) or neither (in which case they are just consumers of the content).
  • When an 'author' edits a page, the page goes into a 'editing in progress' state.
  • When an author views an 'editing in progress' page, they are presented with an option to submit the page for review. This puts the page into the 'waiting for approval' state.
  • Members of the approver group have access to a page in confluence which automatically lists the pages waiting for approval.
  • When an 'approver' visits a 'waiting for approval' page, they are presented with options to accept or reject the changes. If they accept the changes, the page goes to the 'accepted' state, where pages spend most of their life, otherwise it goes to the 'rejected' state.
  • Members of the 'author' group have access to a page in Confluence where they can see all the pages which they edited which have been rejected, or are waiting for approval. They don't see pages other authors have edited.
  • When an author visits a page in the 'rejected' or 'waiting for approval' state, they have the option of withdrawing the change, which moves the page to the accepted state, and rolls back to the most recent approved version.
  • When an author edits a page in the rejected state, it moves to the 'editing in progress' state.

All of this can be done with the Workflow Plugin Prototype.

But we probably also want to show consumers the most recently approved version of a page, not the one currently under review. Without core Confluence changes, the best we can do is show users a banner which says "This content is being reviewed. The most recent approved content is here".

Instead of displaying a message asking the user to redirect, why not output javascript to change the document.location.href or (if you can) output a redirection header?

Although the page itself isnt being rendered in the first load, its better than asking for user interaction to show the desired page.

Posted by dhardiker at Sep 13, 2005 18:14

Why not just output the most recently approved version of a page should the logged in (or anonymous) user not be allowed to see an "under development" page? That would also be nicer when a search engine happens to pop by as the search engine would get meaningful results. I presume that if there are no approved vesions of a page then the page will not appear to people who can not see "under construction" pages, even in children lists, etc.

Posted by gfraser at Sep 13, 2005 18:17

This should be an option, not a default setting. The reason is that it may, in some cases, be desirable to deliver work-in-progress information to anonymous users.

Posted by pat pitou at Feb 10, 2006 13:19

I would presume that the whole Approval Workflow would be an optional setting, as it goes against the general wiki philosophy of having free and open acces to modify information as much as possible. Once you have an Approval Workflow for a page you generally would presume that unauthorised users would only see the authorised version. If it is desirable in some cases then why do you need an Approval Workflow at all?

Posted by jedws at Feb 12, 2006 19:15
Document generated by Confluence on Mar 22, 2007 21:00