Kentico CMS 7: Workflow

About workflow?

Workflow is a sequence of steps that define the life cycle of a document. This allows for setting up a reviewing and approval process to ensure quality of content and design. In such a process, you can specify the roles that different people will play and the places in the flow where the individual people will have influence on a particular document.

An example of a simple workflow process for a website that publishes articles of movies. An author can write an article and send it for approval to an editor, who will make corrections and submit the article to the head of the respective department. The head will then publish the document, thus making it publicly available to read on the website.

About features available in ?

Kentico CMS allows you to use workflow for all documents in the content tree, including uploaded files. It consists of the following features:

• The workflow support allows you to organize the process of content creation, updates and publishing on your website.

• Advanced workflow adds support of branching the workflow process based on macro conditions and user decisions. It also allows for automatic manipulation of the documents as they go through the workflow process.

• The versioning support is tightly bound with workflow and allows you to store, view and roll back previous versions of the content.

• Versioning without workflow creates a new version whenever a document is modified, while the whole editing process remains as if the document was using no workflow at all.

•The content locking (check-in/check-out) support allows you to avoid concurrent modifications of the same document by multiple users.

•The preview support allows you to see the content in the context of the site before it's published. This feature is only available for documents that use workflow - you can preview the documents before switching them to the following step.

•The archiving support allows you to archive a document. Such a document is no longer displayed on the website, but it's kept in the content tree and can be re-published at any time later.

 

Type of workflow

Kentico CMS offers two types of workflows - basic and advanced.

A) Basic workflow
 

In a basic workflow, one step is followed by another in a direct sequence. A basic workflow cycle of a document starts in the Edit step, which means the document is newly created or that there are yet unapproved changes in the document. After going through the defined approval steps, the document gets into the Published step. At that point the system makes the last version of the document visible on the live site.

B) Advanced workflow

Advanced workflow significantly differs from basic workflow in the way how you can design the flow of steps. You can let a document go through different steps based on various conditions, you can allow editors to choose which step they want the document to be moved to, or you can set timeouts for automatically moving documents from one step to another.

Building the content of a website with several editors usually comes with the need to approve this content before publishing, to provide reliable and consistent information to site visitors. This is one of the many scenarios where the Workflow module can be applied. The Advanced Workflow module, with features like branching based on macro conditions, user choices, automated actions and timed actions, brings more power in defining document approval processes to cover even advanced scenarios.

Creating / Designing a workflow : 

You can create and manage workflows in Site Manager -> Development -> Workflows.

 

For basic workflow :

1. Log in to Site Manager and navigate to Development -> Workflows.
2. Click New workflow. 
3. Choose a name for the new workflow and type it in the Display name text box.
4. Click Save. 

The workflow appears in the list on the Workflows page.

Converting a basic workflow to advanced workflow

The Workflow page allows you to convert a basic workflow to an advanced workflow.

1. Log in to Site Manager and navigate to Development -> Workflows.

2. Edit () a basic workflow.

3. If the workflow has the Automatically publish changes property turned on, turn the property off and save the workflow.

4. Click Convert to advanced workflow. A message will appear asking if you really want to convert the workflow to advanced workflow.

5. Click OK to finish the conversion or click Cancel to return to the workflow editing page.

The system converted the basic workflow to an advanced workflow. Also, all the defined steps have been converted into advanced workflow steps.

Creating and managing basic workflow steps 

Creating a workflow step

1. Edit a basic workflow and switch to the Steps tab.

2. Click New workflow step.

3. Enter a name into the Display name field. This is the name that will be displayed to editors when viewing documents that are in the step.

4. Click Save.

Rearranging workflow steps

You can move steps up and down using the Move up and Move down buttons in the list of steps. However, you cannot move the default steps, nor can you move any custom step before the Edit step or past the Published step. If you wish to design a flexible workflow process where the cycle doesn't begin and end with the default steps, consider using an advanced workflow.

Work Steps :-

Configuring workflow operators :

Allowing users to approve or reject documents

Kentico CMS allows you to assign different users and roles to different steps, which in turn allows the specified users and roles to approve or reject documents in a particular step.

This procedure applies to both basic and advanced workflow.