carry2web

Just giving some idea's for future development:

A workflow process supporting a page life cycle status of new, draft page, waiting for review(s) page, approved page, published page, archived page.
Notifications about status changes to appropriate people group(s) or roles.

Currently Mambo offers a couple of groups which are actually roles, like publisher. editor, author. Another groups mechanism would make it possible to use groups for various things in components or modules of the site (show/hide of allow stuff based on being member of a certain group).

stingrey

Yes a better system in thi regard would be useful.

Yeah this is a fairly popular request and is being totally overhauled for 5.0

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johnnywodka

This would be a great feature (groups and permissions)

I support this kind of effort.

ShutterBC

I wonder if it's feasible to extend the workflow concept to a user customizable workflow, allowing them to create any number of states with any number of assignees per state. Any word on the current concept of how workflow would be implemented?

antepante

This is exactly what I'm looking for!

I'm using mambo as an infrastructure for our quality system (ISO9001). With a customizable workflow engine in Mambo I could get rid of the other (comersial) products I'm struggling with.

stingrey

I believe Andrew Eddie or Robert is in charge of implementing this into MOS 5.0, anyway, if you haven;t checked it out already, they discuss workflow implementaion and other 5.0 related thigns here:
http://forum.mamboserver.com/viewtop...asc&highlight=

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brad_mn1988

Related to Groups, Permissions and Workflow and so on is the ability to LOCK a page from edits without certain permissions.

As it is now, author writes, editor edits, publisher publishes... and then the author can get on again and edit the page. Many times this is great, but in our little site the authors are the "humanities" majors and don't think through IT ramifications of their actions. They changed the date of an event on the page, but didn't think to alert the 50 or so people that had already signed up. They thought that changing the date on the page was all they had to do (where you would expect a publisher or higher would have thought to send a special email out to those already signed up). We did send a confirmation email just before the event to everyone, but for many it was too late to change their plans. To make a long story short -- I know, too late -- it was nobody's fault, but the ability to lock content when needed would have been great.

Of course, with sufficient granularity all things are possible, but it might be a good 'hard coded' option along any 'hard coded' workflow steps that become part of 5.0. (I look forward to following the link that Stingrey posted.)

Thanks,
Brad

stingrey

Suggest you post this as a wishlist on the official forum if you are to have any chance of seeing it even considered by the Devs.
They are on there quite a bit and have had positive replies to my two wishes I posted.

Although this access level graualarity is unlikely to be part of Mmabo core till 5.0

One of the Devs has posted that he will look to create a hack for 4.6 to achieve a similar affect. My guess is he will probably use it as a a test base from which ideas for 5.0 can be tested.
http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=8602

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mmx

I think it is in there for no other reasons than the decision to implement the full phpGACL administration console. The existing console in phpGACL does not have an intuitive user interface but could with some work. Based on an earlier comment from Andrew Eddie in the 4.6 or 5.0 thread, it's my understanding that AXO Groups are being used to categorize all elements in Mambo. If the content for all elements is handled using the same content model as they suggest for 5.0, then some of their comments begin to make much more sense.

However, controlling separate permissions and groups/roles within an element suite for the feature sets of those elements would probably require some developer expertise and element specific code. Hopefully, some abstract classes will be added to make this easier.

I recall a thread by Andrew on the old FudForum where he talked about adding groupware support and controlling content creation using a milestone like interface. He also identified the current limitations preventing it from happening in 4.5. 5.0 would certainly overcome those limitations but recent changes to the 4.6 content model might make this possible much earlier. I notice that he started a new thread on porting over objects from DotProject (where he mentors) and other groupware applications, so this could be a possible for 4.6, but probably not the first release of the series.

mmx

An update on this based on observations seen in the 4.6 CVS development snapshots.

All of the 4.6 core components with content are now storing content in mos_content. Centralizing the storage of content in a single table seems like a key stepping stone on the way to workflow management and the integration of permissions support.

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