This video walks through installing and configuring the Workbench Moderation module.

Install

Enable

  • Workbench Moderation

Enable Moderation on a Content Type

To enable moderation on a content type we need to visit its configuration page. I'll enable moderation for the "Article" content type.

  • Go to "Structure => Content Types => Article" (admin/structure/manage/article)
  • In the "Publishing options" tab, select "Create new revision" and "Enable moderation of revisions".
  • (Optional) Select the default state

Workbench moderation does not require the workbench module, and does not require the views module. It does however provide two views should you choose to use them. The "My drafts" and "needs review" views that appear in the "My Workbench" dashboard are available. If you decide to use Workbench Moderation without Workbench, you can override or clone these views and place them anywhere on your site.

Configure

Configure the module at "Configuration => Workbench => Workbench Moderation" (admin/config/workbench/moderation)

Configure States

In the "States" tab, you'll see the three default states "Draft", "Published" and "Needs Review". We can also add additional states here, as the help text explains, but I'll just stick with the defaults.

Configure Transitions

In the "Transitions" tab, we can select which states a piece of content can transition between. The default transitions allow content to move from Draft to Needs Review, from Needs Review back to Draft, and from Needs Review to Published. We can add additional transitions here. Simply select the states from the select lists. I'm going to create one from Draft directly to Published.

This isn't something that you'd want to allow most users to do, as it would defeat the purpose of using Workbench Moderation in the first place, however, we'll pretend that some of our users are amazing writers, and won't ever need to be moderated, just for the sake of the example.

We will be able to select which roles can use which transitions when we talk about permissions, so just because a transition is listed here doesn't mean that every user will be able to use any transition.

Before we take a look at the permissions though, let's take a look at the last tab.

Check Permissions

The "Check Permissions" tab presents a handy little utility that can be used to identify why a particular user cannot perform a given action. For example, if our authenticated users are unable to create an article, we can select the role "Authenticacted user", the Moderation task "Author moderated content" and the Content type "Article", then click "Check".

When we do that, we will get a list of permissions that we may need to give to the "authenticated user" role in order for them to perform the given task. There is also a notice that says "The authenticated user role may be a qualified author regardless of these notices..", this is because the module is checking the role against Workbench Moderation specific permissions and is not checking permissions like "administer content" and "bypass moderation restrictions". If you're curious which permissions are being checked, there's a fantastic list of recommended permissions for each type of content administrator (ie: author, editor, moderator and publisher) in the online documentation at drupal.org/node/1175592. I'll actually walk you through each of these recommended permission sets in just a minute. So, because the permissions can get pretty complicated, if you're having issues, the "Check Permissions" tab is a great place to see if it is simply an issue with permissions.