Changes to the Sitecore Editing Interface Related to Workflow
A Quick Review of What's New
Starting Tue, Jan 12, every sitecore item will be in a workflow state: Draft, Review, or Approved.
- Existing items on existing sites start in the Approved state.
- Going forward, all new items that are created will start in the Draft state.
- Editing an existing item will cause a new version of that item to be created in the Draft state. The old version of the edited item will remain untouched.
- Edited items can be promoted from the Draft state to Review, and then to Approved.
- Approved items will be pubished automatically
Changes to the Process...
- The OLD process: editing, saving, and publishing
- The NEW process: editing, saving, promoting the item to the "Approved" state
Notes on Publishing
- Anything pushed to the final workflow state (Approved) will be published automatically.
- Manual publishing is not needed and won't cause an unapproved version to appear to the public.
Notes on Promoting Items Through Workflow
- All new or edited items start in the Draft state.
- Site Contributors and Site Managers can use the Review tab to promote an item in the Draft state.
- Site Managers can also use the Workbox to promote items in the Draft or Review states.
Changes you'll be Seeing...
Warnings
This is a new warning you will see every time you edit or create a new item - it merely reminds you the version you are editing will not be published because it is not approved.
Review Ribbon
The largest change to the user interface will be to the review ribbon.
Here is the OLD Review ribbon you would see before editing a page. Although it DOES contain a "Workflow" area, you can see there aren't many tools available.
Here is the OLD Review ribbon after an item is locked for editing. You may never have used this ribbon, as it was not essential, but you can see that the "Edit" tool has switched to "Check In."
Here is the NEW Review ribbon prior to editing a page. As you can see there are more tools available in the "Workflow" area:
- The "Edit" tool does the same thing that "Lock and Edit" has always done - it allows you to edit the page.
- The "Display" tool will show the current version of the item as it would appear to the public.
- The "History" tool will show the dates and editor's comments of previous versions of this item, if any.
Here is the NEW Review ribbon when a page is being edited:
- The version shown here (v6) is in the Draft state, and so we see a "Submit for review" button that will promote this item into the Review state.
- Sitecore users with the Site Manager role will also see a "Approve for publication" button that will put this item directly into the Approved state.
Workbox
The workbox is the other new piece of the user interface. This is an area dedicated to moving the work-in-progress versions through to their final workflow states so that they can be published. Read the full documentation of the workbox.
Preview vs. Display
An important change affects the preview function:
- Formerly, the Preview function could be used to see the work-in-progress version of an item before it was published.
- With workflow turned on, the Display function is the only way to view an item in the Draft or Review state.
- The Preview function is still available for you to use, but it only shows Approved versions. Its best use is for looking backwards in time over previous versions of items
The Display function is available on the Review tab
The Display function is also available in the workbox
The Preview function is available on the Publish tab
