Setting up editorial work flow in WordPress

If you allow multiple people to post articles and pages to your site, you will want to stay up to date on what your authors and contributors are doing, and you may want to set up a system that allows posts to be reviewed and edited prior to publication. While you can always manage this manually by sending e-mails back and forth, that approach is far from ideal and can be quite a time-consuming task. A better solution to this problem is found in a plugin called Edit Flow.
Edit Flow is a complex plugin. It not only adds content noti cations and review process, but also gives the ability to create custom status posts and groups for your users. There are also features appropriate for an online publications, such as an editorial calendar and a story budget feature. If you do not need all the features, the plugin allows you to only enable those things you require. In this recipe we look how the Edit Flow plugin can be used to create a manageable editorial work ow for content creation on your site.
Get Started 

To execute this recipe, you will need to install the Edit Flow plugin. You will need to install this plugin before you can get started. Search for Edit Flow inside the Add New Plugins screen of your WordPress site. After you nd it, click on it to install, and then activate it. 

Let's start out by con guring Edit Flow for basic article submissions and a review process:

1. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard.
   
2. Click on the new menu named Edit Flow.
   
3. On the con guration screen, de-select Enable Edit Flow Calendar and Enable Story Budget. Also select the option Always Notify Admin.
   
4. Click on Save Changes.
   

 How Does It Works....?

You now have a basic editorial review process in place, with noti cations being sent to the site admin every time critical actions occur. The plugin has automatically added a set of custom statuses for your posts and pages. Click on the link Custom Status to see the list. The plugin has also created new usergroups. View the groups by clicking on the Usergroups option in the Edit Flow menu.
Taken together, the changes allow a site user (assuming they have permission to create content!) to submit an article for review. Noti cations will be sent to higher-level users, who can then log in and comment privately on the content of the posts. When comments are made, the author is noti ed. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary. Once the post is ready for publication, the status of the post can be changed to published, thereby completing the editorial cycle.
When you log in to the dashboard, a new Edit Flow widget shows you a list of the posts in the editorial process, as shown in the following screenshot:

As the next screenshot shows, the editing page for each post now contains several extra field:

1.  The Editorial Comments eld is where the editors can comment privately on the post for the author's bene t.
2.  The Noti cations Subscriptions section allows you to specify who will receive noti cations and can avoid your site editors and admins from being bombarded with unwanted e-mails.
3.  The Editorial Metadata elds give you a way to capture useful information about the post for your internal records. These elds can be customized from the Edit Flow menu.