When approaching content modeling from the lens of editorial workflows, you’ll want to focus on structuring your site’s content model to streamline the process of creating, editing, approving, and publishing content. The goal is to make it intuitive for your editorial team to collaborate efficiently while maintaining consistency and quality.
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to ensure your content model accounts for the editorial workflow of your organization, as it applies to content for your Drupal CMS site.
Define roles and permissions
Identify the roles in the team and their responsibilities. Common roles might include:
- Content creators: Write and draft content but can’t publish.
- Editors: Review and approve content for publication.
- Administrators: Manage the site and oversee the workflow.
Use Drupal CMS’s Roles and Permissions features to ensure each role has access only to the actions they need.
Create content moderation workflows
Enable the Content Moderation module to manage the state of each piece of content. In your content model, decide which content types would benefit from content moderation and which should be excluded from.
Decide on workflow states like:
- Draft: Initial state for new content.
- Needs review: Content is ready for editor feedback.
- Published: Approved content visible to site visitors.
- Archived: Old content that’s no longer needed but should be kept for reference.
Build a content model that supports collaboration
Use Drupal CMS content types. They already contain fields that help streamline the editorial process, such as:
- Author field: Automatically tracks who created the content.
- Last updated field: Displays when the content was last edited.
- Notes/Comments field: Allows editors and creators to leave notes about revisions or approvals.
Provide clarity for editors
Create structured content types with predefined fields to guide content creators:
- Example: A wine tour content type with fields like "Title," "Price," and "Region" ensures consistency across all tours.
Add help text for fields to explain how each field should be filled out (e.g., “Enter the tour price in USD without symbols”).
Example: Editorial workflow for a wine tours site
Workflow states:
- Draft:
- Content is created but not ready for review.
- Accessible only to the creator and editors.
- Needs review:
- Content is ready for an editor to review and approve.
- Editors can leave comments or send it back to Draft for further editing.
- Published:
- Content is approved and live on the site.
- Accessible to all visitors.
- Archived:
- Content is no longer active but retained for records.
Example: Wine Tour Content Type with Workflow in Mind
Fields:
- Title: "Willamette Valley Wine Adventure"
- Body: Full description of the tour.
- Region: Linked to the "Wine Region" taxonomy.
- Price: $150
- Tour date range: Start and end dates for availability.
- Status: Workflow state (e.g., Draft, Needs Review, Published).
- Notes: Collaboration space for comments like "Confirm price with winery."
- Author: Automatically assigned.
Workflow:
- A content creator adds a new tour and sets it to "Draft."
- An editor reviews the draft, adds comments in the notes field, and changes the state to "Needs Review" or sends it back to the creator for updates.
- Once finalized, the Editor sets the state to "Published," making it live.
Wrap-up
By designing a content model with an editorial workflow in mind, you can:
- Ensure team members know exactly what’s expected at each step of the workflow.
- Increase efficiency with well-structured content types with clear labels and appropriate field types that ensure consistency in data entry.
- Implement quality control by setting up roles and permissions and enabling revisions to track changes.
- Manage growing content needs and multiple editors with well-defined editorial workflows that ensure your content is consistent and high quality even as it grows.