Showing Backdrop to my client, one of her reactions was "Oh nice, it already has Drafts built in. So how do I share my drafts with the rest of my group before I publish?" So what she's looking for isn't really Backdrop's idea of "draft", which is just "unpublished" by another name, yes?

I haven't seen any modules ported over or discussions about this general topic. Is some kind of editorial workflow not something that people have seen as a need? Or are people handling this in custom ways? Just curious what your thoughts are.

Comments

This is a good question. I went to the GitHub issue queue expecting to find an open ticket on the issue of including more advanced content workflow features in Backdrop Core, but I'm not finding any discussion on this topic (I might have missed it). Someone will let us know if they are there. :-)

There has been quite a bit of work on improving the content editor experience, just not specially aimed at the kind of workflow issues that Workbench addressed in Drupal 7.

Clearly, this is something that Drupal 8 has addressed. I suspect that there might be some opposition to putting this in Backdrop core, because it may not meet the 80% use case criteria that Backdrop uses to help prioritize new features. 

But, it's also weird that there is nothing in Contrib either. Let's see what others think?

I've had a few sites over the years that could use some advanced workflow features and built one Drupal 8 site that used them. But, most of my sites probably don't need them. I could see this as a valuable core feature, but I am not sure where it fits in with other priorities. 

NOTE: If you think this is a good idea for Backdrop, there are a few things you can do in addition to posting your question here in the forum. 

1) Go to the Backdrop CMS issue core issue queue and create a ticket recommending that this be added to core. You can at least start the discussion even if the eventual decision is to leave this for the contrib space. It doesn't hurt to ask and anyone can open a ticket here: https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues

2) Find a Drupal 7 module that you think would fit the bill. If you are unable to port it yourself, you can post a port request here: https://github.com/backdrop-ops/contrib/issues

There are no guarantees that anyone will port it, but seeing that you are interested in it is an incentive. I've posted a few port requests here and eventually seen at least 1-2 of them get ported. Not sure if my port request had anything to do with that, but I'm sure it didn't hurt.

@ - You might be aware of these options, but repeating them for others that might have a similar question. 

I was a bit surprised to not find anything as well. But then, it's something I've only used on one site out of the last dozen I worked on in Drupal 7. The Workflow module mentioned in 1465 did well enough for us then.

We may be able to get by with customizing the "view unpublished content" permission. I think the users are speculating about what they might like.