Moderation Collections

A Moderation Collection groups draft content versions together for review and publishing. Grouping is the unit of work in moderation: reviewers are invited per collection, locking applies per collection, and publishing happens from within a collection.

Each collection has an author (also called its moderator) — the user who created it — and a Workflow that defines its approval steps. The workflow can only be changed while the collection is still collecting content.

States

A collection moves through four states:

Collecting

The initial state. The author — and only the author — can add draft versions to the collection. Content is added from the CMS toolbar of a draft (Submit for moderation) or via the Add to moderation collection bulk action in a registered model’s admin changelist.

In review

Entered when the author clicks Submit collection for review. The reviewers of the first workflow step are notified, and the drafts in the collection become review-locked: they cannot be edited, and no further drafts can be added. Reviewers now act on the collection’s Moderation Requests.

Archived

A finished collection. A collection archives itself automatically as soon as every remaining request in it has been approved and acted upon (published or removed). Archived collections cannot be modified; the state exists mainly to keep the collection list tidy and filterable.

Cancelled

A collection can be cancelled by its author at (almost) any stage, provided they hold the Can cancel collection permission. Cancelling deactivates all active moderation requests, releases the locks and notifies the author of each affected draft.

Working with a collection in review

The collection’s requests changelist offers bulk actions. Which of them a given user sees depends on their relationship to the collection — see Roles and permissions:

Approve

(Reviewers) Approve the selected requests for the current workflow step. If a later step exists, its reviewers are notified; otherwise the request becomes ready for publishing.

Submit for rework

(Reviewers) Reject the selected requests. The author is notified and the review lock is lifted for the author only, so they can edit the content. Previous approvals are archived — after resubmission the workflow starts again from the first step.

Submit for review

(Author) Resubmit reworked requests, notifying the reviewers again.

Publish

(Author) Publish the selected approved requests. This triggers versioning’s publish operation and ends moderation for those drafts.

Remove from collection

(Author) Take a draft out of the collection, releasing its lock.