Status transition
The status transitions are the active part of the workflow. This is where users can push content along its lifecycle and pass it among themselves.
When a user is done with his or her task on the content according to his or her role, that user can usually change the status of the content. This action can make the content available to other user roles who can perform other tasks, and then pass it along for the next step.
Any status transition can be added at any time in the Workflow. For this you need to know what is the starting status, the destination status and the user role allowed to perform the transition.
If for example the users having the role of Author have to create Draft versions, then send it to reviewers as To be reviewed, then receive a Reviewed version and make it To be approved, we have at least the following transitions for authors:
- Draft > To be reviewed; Author
- Reviewed > To be approved; Author
Transitions can be further detailed:
- Metadata
- You can add filters based on metadata (properties) other than the status. If you have a specific type of content, legal disclaimers for example, you could set the workflow to allow a set of transitions to a user role different than the one normally assigned for some transitions each time the content is tagged legal.
- Functions
- During the Content Manager implementation phase, there is a possibility to add functionality to property changes through plugins (especially Write plugins). The status of an object version is one such property. Therefore, this plugin implementation can associate specific functionality to some status transitions in an indirect way.