This week we talked with a PublishPress customer who wanted to build an approval process for his website. His goal is to allow administrators to assign empty posts to authors, who can then add the content and pass them back to the administrator for approval. Here are the four steps in that workflow:
Admin creates a post.
Admin assigns the post to an author.
Author adds content to the posts.
Author submits the post to the Admin for approval.
In this guide, we'll explain how to set up this workflow on your WordPress site.
By default, WordPress users in the admin area can see all the Posts on the site, regardless of whether they are the author.
This is not a problem for many sites. After all, most Posts on most sites are publicly available – there's no need to hide them.
However, in some situations, site owners don't want authors to see the Posts that other users are working on. For example, one PublishPress customer wanted to create a private inbox for WordPress users.
By default, WordPress does not allow you to see a list of your own draft posts.
This can be frustrating if you want to see your work in progress.
The image below shows the filters on top of the “Posts” screen in WordPress. As you can see, there are a lot of available filters. However, you can't use more than one of the top row of filters. You can either click “Mine” or you can click “Draft” … you can't choose both at the same time.
PublishPress provides 3 dashboard widgets: Unpublished Content, Notepad, and Posts I'm following. These widgets appear on the main Dashboard screen in your WordPress admin area.
The Unpublished Content widget gives an overview of the content that is in each custom status. Currently, this widget does only show posts, not other post types.
If you click on any of the links in this widget, you'll be taken to the main Posts page, and show only post with that status. Here is an example using the Draft status:
Notepad
The Notepad widget is very simple. It's a text box where you can store notes for yourself: