Workflows

Each piece of content can exist in one of three publishing states: Draft, Published, and Archived. There is a workflow system in place which allows you to change the content from one of these states to another. All content begins in the Draft state, and can then be Published or Archived. The controls for this workflow appear above the Save button at the bottom of the editing form.

A screenshot of the workflow form, showing the current state as Published and giving the editor the option to change this to Draft or Archived.

Draft

Content begins in the Draft state and will remain in this state until Published or Archived. In the Draft state, the content can only be viewed by an editor or a member of the Reviewers role. If there is an individual in our area who you would like to have the Reviewer role so that they can view your draft content, please contact us.

You can assign Draft content to a menu, but it and its children will only be visible to people who are logged in and can edit it. The text [draft] will appear after its title in the menu.

Draft content won't be reference-able on the site. If you are building a list of Profiles or Stories you will need to change the state of those items to Published before you can add them to the list.

Published

Once you move content to the Published state, it is visible to everyone and will appear in the menu to anyone viewing the page. Published content is fully public and will be indexed by search engines, provided you have not edited its Meta Tags to exclude it.

When content is Published you can edit it, and select Draft as its next state. This will keep the content published, but will create a new Draft of the content that you can revise. When you are ready to publish the Draft change its state to Published and this will replace the previously published version of the content. You can revert to previously Published versions using Revisions.

Archived

You can also change the state of content to Archived. This will remove the currently Published version of the content and it will no longer be available to the public. The content will remain visible in the menu, but only to people who are logged in and can edit it. The text [archived] will appear after its title in the menu.

A screenshot of a menu showing the current page, Learning Goals, in an archived state with "[archived]" after its title.

We previously had “Recycle Bins” in Drupal that many people used to store outdated content. These no longer exist. You need to use the Archived state for this purpose. If you delete content from any of these states, you are permanently deleting it.

Moderated Content

Drupal provides an interface to view all of the content you can edit which is in a Draft or Archived state. You can filter the list to only show content in one of those states. This gives you the ability to review any pending drafts and publish them, if they are ready, or to remove any archived content you no longer need.

A screenshot of the Moderated Content interface in the Drupal administration system.

To get to the Moderated Content interface, click on Manage in the admin bar at the top of the screen while logged in, then on Content. When the page loads, click on the Moderated Content tab in the middle of the screen.

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