[Esip-drupal] Question about State-based Permissions in Content Workflow

Mon Dec 8 16:12:32 EST 2014

Hello all,

We are implementing content management workflows in Drupal 7.x using the Workbench Access and Workbench Moderation modules. The issue we were facing is the lack of ability to define permissions at a state level (draft -> in review -> publish). We need to control what roles can edit the content at a given state so that once someone assigned to the Authoring role has pushed the content to "in review" he can no longer edit the content unless the Reviewer role returns it to "draft".  The way Workbench Moderation is set up now, the original author can sneak in another change just before the reviewer publishes the content.

This issue has been pointed out by many in the Drupal community but the maintainers  of Workbench Moderation claim that it "works as designed" and do not considered this a problem (https://www.drupal.org/node/1296216) .   I installed a module called  Workbench State Access<https://drupal.org/project/workbench_state_access> which provides the granular permission to each role according to state but it is buggy and did not work. This module is also not officially part of the Workbench suite (as the name seems to indicate) so it's lack of functionality does not surprise me.

We did install the patch mentioned in the post above and it resolved our problem, but I was wondering what others in the ESIP Drupal group are doing to handle their workflows.  I have also used the Workflow module along with the Revisioning module but found the end-user experience to be confusing and the role permissions were complicated to setup between the two modules.

Thanks for any feedback.

Tony Ritrivi

Web Developer
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
Building 32, 610.2, Greenbelt,MD
301-614-5091

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