Content Moderation and Workflow

Content Moderation States

There are several states available for content, and these states control whether or not content will be visible to the public. These states include Draft, Review, Published, and Archive.

These states are primarily used when creating new content for your site, or when content is outdated, but may be used again in the future. The workflow is used for Articles, Basic Pages, and People.

Draft - Not Publicly Visible

New content is created in the Draft stage. All Editors, Publishers and Webmasters may create content for this state.

Drafts can be created from published or archived content. Edits made to the new Draft will not appear on the original. The original will remain in its current moderation state (i.e. Published or Archived). If a piece of content should not be publicly visible while the Draft is edited, it should be moved out of Published and into the Archived state, in addition to creating a Draft.

Review - Not Publicly Visible

Content can be moved from Draft by the Editor, Publisher, and Webmaster roles. This content should be considered completed, and in need of proofing/editing prior to final publication.

Publishers and Webmasters, after reviewing content, may move it from Review to Published. While the content may still be altered, at this point the content will be visible to the public. (Note: Publishers and Webmasters may move content directly from Draft to Published.)

Archived - Not Publicly Visible

Published content which is out-of-date or otherwise not to be currently available for public viewing may be Archived by a Publisher or Webmaster.

Content which has been Archived may be accessed by Publishers, Webmasters, and the Editor who created the content, but it will not be visible to anyone else. Publishers and Webmasters may restore an Archived piece of content to Published, where it will again be publicly visible.

Drafts may be created from Archived content. If created, changes made to the Draft will not impact the original content.

Published - Publicly Visible

Drafts may be created from Published content, however this will not unpublish the current content. The original content will remain publicly visible, though any edits made to the Draft will not appear on the original, published content.

Monitoring Content

All site content can be searched and filtered to quickly find any pages currently in Draft, in need of Review, or other states. If more than one Draft or Review revision are available for an individual piece of content, only the most recent will appear here as the "active" content.

From /admin/content, change tabs from Overview to Moderated Content.

Revisions

To view or revert to an old revision of a piece of content (Basic Page, Article, Person), select "Revisions" next to the "View" and "Edit" links while viewing the content.

There is never more than two "active" revisions. A revision which is Published and live and a revision which is not published. This revision can be viewed using the "Latest version" link while viewing the content. The "active" revision that is not published will appear under Moderated Content overview (admin/content/moderated).

In general, there is a 10 revision limit for content. A background process periodically identifies candidate revisions and removes them from the database. Additionally, revisions are identified as candidates for removal differently based on the current status of the content.

If there are no published revisions of the content (e.g. just draft/needs review revisions), the limit of 10 revisions is applied. If there is a published (current revision), any revisions older than the next 9 revisions (10 counting the published revision) are considered candidates for removal.

This means based on when the processes run and where the published (current) revision is positioned in the revisions list, there might be more than 10 revisions listed.

Some updates to the SiteNow service might create a new revision based on the changes involved, increasing the number of revisions. With that in mind, revisions should be used as a tool when actively working on new content for your website, not as a long-term archive.