Drupal 8 content workflow initiative and its advantages

Content is king, according to Bill Gates’ famous phrase. And the king needs royal treatment and due attention, right? Drupal definitely provides that! ;) There is a content workflow initiative in Drupal 8 aimed at improving ways of working with content — and at bringing them to the next level. Together with new approaches to configuration management, mobile support and much more, this initiative helps Drupal 8 really rock it!

Drupal 8 content workflow initiative: how it all began

During DrupalCon in India, Drupal’s ‘founding father’ Dries Buytaert discussed with a bunch of other brilliant drupalers the works that were being done in the content realm. He wrote in his blog post that it might be really great to focus on advancing Drupal's content workflow capabilities. He recommended including features like better auditability, full-site preview, content staging, offline support, and more.

Digging deeper: what the initiative includes

So, the initiative is under way, and there is such a lot of work to do! It is based on greatly extending and improving what the Entity API has to offer, drawing inspiration from a number of Drupal 8 contributed modules like Entity, Workbench Moderation, Multiversion, Workspace, and Deploy. The enhancements are to be added to the Drupal core in minor releases (from Drupal 8.2 to Drupal 8.5). All of them are divided into what must be done, what should be done and what could be done.

So let’s take a look at the must-have issues.

Revision history

The main idea of this enhancement is to make the content entities (except for the user entity) revisionable with the help of Revision API, that is, to give content editors the ability to easily track all content revisions. It’s great for resolving revision conflicts, improving the moderation process, and more. For some companies, keeping revision history is indispensable.

Moderation module

Here, the drupalers are going to create an experimental module with a UI for moderating the publishing state of individual content entities.

Trash bin

Entities deserve a second chance ;) So, the delete method in the Entity API is going to be replaced with the archive and purge method. Entities will no longer be deleted, instead they will be flagged as archived. Then they can be restored or permanently deleted.

Workspace API

This feature will let content editors track what revision exists in what workspace (i.e. a container for content). Workspaces are expected to play an important role for future implementation of full-site previews and deploying the content between different environments or sites. A very exciting future!

Though previews and deploying are among the non-must-have issues of this initiative, and still depend on the other functionality to be implemented, we know everything is possible. Of course, with such an enthusiastic community of developers and a really powerful CMF such as Drupal.

Everything that has already been created, or is still to be created within Drupal 8 initiatives, or something totally different that needs individual functionality creation, can be on your Drupal website. Content is king, but the emperor is you, so whatever you want for your website should be fulfilled! For any of these issues, Drudesk website support service is ready to help.