Robin Barre of Palantir.net joins me this week to talk about the Workbench suite of modules.

Workbench

• The Workbench suite is an awesome suite of modules! I haven’t used it on a site yet, simply because I haven’t taken the time to learn it. But they say that the best way to learn something is to teach it, so I’m actually in the process of putting together a video series covering the entire suite. So, I’m excited to get that out later this month!
• To quote the project page “Workbench provides overall improvements for managing content that Drupal does not provide out of the box.” Would you be willing to elaborate a bit on what those improvements are?
• Use Case: From what I understand, this is like a “Workbench API” module. It doesn’t do anything on its own, but includes the code and functionality common to the other three modules, separated out so that you don’t need to enable all of the modules if you just want the functionality one of them. Is that true? Or does the Workbench module do something on its own?

Workbench Access

• Workbench Access provides some awesome access controls to who can create and edit content on a site. What are the possible ways of deciding who has access to what?
  • Are there plans to include Organic Groups as usable hierarchies?
• Use Case: hierarchichal access control

Workbench Moderation

• Okay, so, I haven’t dove into Workbench Moderation or Workbench Media yet, so I’m flying blind here. What exactly does Workbench Moderation do?
• What states can you add?
• Why would you want to add additional states?
• Can this be integrated with the Scheduler module to schedule the next version?
• When is the 2.x version due?
• Use Case: editorial workflow and any time you want to save as Draft

Workbench Media

• This integrates with the media module right?
  • What does this module do that the Media module doesn’t do by itself?
  • What does it do to the way media is viewed?
  • Does it control access to media assets? (ie: “my media”)

Questions from Twitter

• Steve Burge (@alledia): I'm interested in how much Workbench takes over from core parts of Drupal. For example, would you use WorkBench Access instead of core user roles and permissions?