Large organizations want to, or may actually need, strict access control and content review workflows to manage the publishing process on their website. Drupal’s default roles and permissions system is designed to handle the simplest of setups. However, there is a wide variety of modules that each address these needs. Many of them overlap, some complement each other, while others are abandonded and haven’t been ported to Drupal 7. In this article, I’ll look at some active modules for these requirements.
Revisioning for Basic Workflow
Unless your web publishing workflow is very complicated -= in which case, I think you have other problems – the Revisioning module should suit a basic author-editor review setup. You’ll need at least two roles, an author role that can create and update but not publish new nodes, and an editor role that reviews and publishes changes made by authors.
Authors write content that prior to being made publicly visible must be reviewed (and possibly edited) by moderators. Once the moderators have published the content, authors should be prevented from modifying it while “live”, but they should be able to submit new revisions to their moderators.
Once installed, the module provides a view to show revision status at /content-summary.
Content Access for write privileges
The Content Access module allows more fine grained control over view, edit, and delete permissions. Furthermore, it allows you to set access controls on a per node basis. This lets you restrict the set of pages, stories, or other content types that a single role can change.
This module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows you to specifiy custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you can enable per content access settings, so you can customize the access for each content node.
Related Modules
If you need “serious” workflow in your Drupal, there is the aptly named Workflow module, and the newer State Machine and Workbench Moderation modules. These modules seem to be actively developed, and with enough time, tweaking and experimentation should help solve many workflow issues.