[4.0] Workflow enhancement

[bembelimen]

In September 2019 a small working group (@wilsonge , @HLeithner , @marcodings and me) discussed about the current status of the Publishing Workflow in Joomla! 4.

We asserted, that the current implementation works for publishing, but has a lot of limitations in regards of additional functionality like featured, notification etc. So we decided to go in the direction of a state machine-alike to bring in more flexibility.

We implemented the following changes:

• No Joomla! 3 pseudo-default-workflow anymore. If you don't need the workflow, you can now disable it and Joomla! behaves exactly like in version 3.
• No conditions anymore. The article visibility is now back to the "state" of the article itself (published, unpublished, trashed, archived) and not based on any "conditions" in the workflow.
• The leading elements in the workflow are now the transitions, which triggers different workflow plugins to change state/features/etc. of items and not the stages anymore => you can create own workflow plugins to manage nearly everything with the workflow (like check for intro images and auto-resize,cut, manage permissions via workflow, ...)
• We ship per default three plugins:
  publishing => Change status of items via the workflow
  featured => change featured state of items via the workflow (Thanks to @HLeithner )
  notification => send internal messages to people based on executed transitions (Thanks to @chmst )

Video preview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ibAhPkVadc

Testing Instructions

Install the Nightly build or download the ZIP file (https://github.com/bembelimen/joomla-cms/archive/workflow-v3.zip) and make a fresh installation. Afterwards go to the Article manager, there you'll find a new menu entry "Workflows", play with it around. You can also use the implemented default workflow.

Workflows will be assigned in the category parameters.

Update testing

Please also test the update path: #29235 (comment)

Documentation

https://docs.joomla.org/Publishing_Workflow

Things yet to come

• @brianteeman created a first awesome idea list of things to improve: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K1Fc_W92o_1b9gxX8Qe2wXAcxPSHwCpprrlI_E28-w8/edit# (Thank you Brian)
• There are some ideas left: https://github.com/bembelimen/joomla-cms/issues
• Stabilize the implementation, get a lot of testers involved

Thank you

• @HLeithner who was a very big help, wrote a lot of code (including feature plugin), spent hundred of hours giving feedback, creating concepts etc. Thank you!
• @chmst was always there to fix and test things, wrote the notification plugin and so much more
• @richard67 helped with database issues
• @Hackwar helping with the tests and CS
• @wilsonge had always a helping hand with code and supported the whole work from the beginnig. You rock!
• Philip Walton + @uglyeoin for your support, the update of the documentation and getting testers on board.

[bembelimen]

Remove Stage ascending/Stage descending from Sort Table By: dropdown when workflows is disabled.

781fab1

[Quy]

Editing an article on the frontend with workflows disabled.

[bembelimen]

Editing an article on the frontend with workflows disabled.

That is a template problem, the colors are wrong

[Quy]

Current Stage and Target Stage options not in Sort Table By dropdown under Transitions.

[Quy]

Is it ok for Stage ascending/Stage descending to be at the bottom of the list instead at the top where they would normally be?

[Quy]

Edit a stage. Is it correct with the Name field?

[wilsonge]

Thankyou @bembelimen , @chmst and @HLeithner for your hard work!

[bembelimen]

Thank you @wilsonge

[geekonthepc]

Hi everyone,

Firstly, can I please thank everyone for their really hard work getting this together. My organisation wants to upgrade to Joomla 4 as soon as reasonably possible primarily for this feature. In our previous CMS (Liferay), we had a workflow functionality of sorts. We moved to Joomla 3 late last year and have so far got on with it very well, although we do miss the workflows.

I've just installed Joomla 4 Beta 1 on a test node so I can have a sneak peek at how this works.

One question though - and I hope that I'm writing this in the correct place.

All of the workflow functionality implemented thus far seems to work great for new articles. My question, however, is whether there is any functionality for moderating the edits of existing articles? Our approval team wants to be able to moderate changes to articles as well as new articles. In our old CMS, if an article was changed but a standard author, the last approved version remained published while the new version was sent of for approval. If it was approved, the latest version was published. If it was denied, the old version would remain published until a newer version was approved.

Do the new workflow states/transitions in Joomla 4 support this functionality?

Sorry to ask a question in this manner - I'm trying to understand what is likely to be possible in Joomla 4 and beyond.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. if this should be posted somewhere else, please let me know.

---

_{This comment was created with the J!Tracker Application at issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/29235.}

[richard67]

@bembelimen Could you check the above questions? What is the best place to ask these questions?

[bembelimen]

Hello @geekonthepc thank you for showing interested in the new workflow.

I think the best place is to ask in Glip. And feel free to contact me there for a deeper discussion.

But as I'm here, I try to answer your question.

In the core state a staging solution is not included, but there are plans to do it in coming releases.

So far the negative answer, the positive answer is: if you're capital to write your own plugin, you can write a workflow plugin to build this functionality. The idea could be, that you write a transition add-on which uses the versioning of Joomla for creating drafts. So saving a new version but reset the current version to the old one.
Does that help?

[geekonthepc]

Hi @bembelimen

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

That's really helpful - thanks. The fact that staging of some sort has been discussed for a potential future release is certainly encouraging - as you say in the meantime a custom plugin could be the way forward to bolt on that functionality.

It's certainly good to know the current state of play so we can determine which route to take.

Many thanks

---

_{This comment was created with the J!Tracker Application at issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/29235.}

[Hackwar]

@geekonthepc If you plan to create or order a custom plugin, you might want to consider if you can fund a developer to do that as a core contribution. I myself have done this for the Smart Search component. A customer of mine needed basically that search functionality and with their support, I was able to refactor com_finder not just for them, but for everyone. Such a staging feature could be another good case for such a funding.

[Quy]

In \administrator\components\com_workflow\forms\filter_workflows.xml, the following:

	<fieldset name="group">
		<field
			name="extension"
			type="workflowcontexts"
			filtermode="selector"
			onchange="this.form.submit();"
		/>
	</fieldset>

generates:

		<div class="js-stools-field-selector">
	<div class="sr-only">
		<label id="extension-lbl" for="extension">
	extension</label>
	</div>
	<input
	type="hidden"
	name="extension"
	id="extension"
	value="com_content.article"
	 onchange="this.form.submit();">
</div>

Resulting a hidden field causing extra padding:

Is the code required here?