Workflows and Steps

A Workflow describes the approval process a Moderation Collection has to pass: an ordered series of steps, each reviewed by a Role. If your organisation requires sign-off from, say, marketing, legal and compliance, the workflow has three steps, each assigned to the corresponding role — and content cannot be published until every required step has approved it.

Workflows are created and managed in the admin under django CMS Moderation → Workflows. A project can define any number of them; each collection picks one when it is created. The workflow marked is default is preselected for new collections (only one workflow can be the default).

Steps

Each workflow has at least one step, edited inline on the workflow admin page. A step consists of:

  • a role — the user or group expected to review at this step (the same role can only appear once per workflow);

  • an is mandatory flag — a request is publishable once every mandatory step has approved it; steps with the flag unticked may review, but do not block publication;

  • an order — steps are processed top to bottom; reviewers of step two are only notified once step one has approved.

For example, an organisation where each department must approve every request would:

  1. set up a user group per department,

  2. create one workflow,

  3. add one step per department, assigning the department’s group as the step’s role.

Compliance numbers

A workflow can stamp every fully approved request with a unique audit reference. The requires compliance number? flag, the backend choice and the free-form identifier field (used as a prefix by one of the built-in backends) control this — see How to generate compliance numbers.