Define Entry Editing Permissions on Workflow Stages

If your organization has a lengthy content creation lifecycle, a well-defined workflow is like an automated conveyor system that ensures that the progression of tasks is flowing in the right direction. The more control over your workflow, the better you can streamline the content creation process.

That’s why we introduced more granularity to control permissions in our workflows. You can now define which users or roles can edit the entries at different stages of the workflow. This ensures that only the right people can edit content at the right stage.

The following explains what’s new in our workflows.

Set Edit Permissions on Specific Workflow Stages

Until now, the “stage transition rules” option in workflow settings allowed developers to define transitioning rules and enabled content creators to easily pass content from one stage to another in the content creation lifecycle. It also ensured that only the authorized users could change the entry stage.

However, the actual content, i.e., the entry, was open to everyone for editing, irrespective of the workflow stage it belonged to. This diluted the importance of a workflow. Imagine that the content is in its final stage, ready to be published on your website, and the author makes major changes to the content, or someone accidentally deletes a paragraph at the last minute.

It could lead to an unwanted disaster, couldn’t it? Not anymore.

We have now added a new option under the workflow settings that lets you define the users or roles that can edit the entry when in a particular stage.

For example, you can specify that only the users with the “Editors” role can edit the entry when in the “Review” stage, or only “Media Specialists” can make changes when the entry is on the “Images and Media” stage.

This ensures that there is never any unwanted modification to your content, especially by someone who shouldn’t be making the change in a specific stage.

Read our documentation on Workflows to get an in-depth understanding of this enhancement.

How to Set Edit Permissions on a Workflow Stage

To set edit access permissions on an entry that has been moved to a particular workflow stage, follow the below steps:

1. Go to your stack, and then choose Settings > Workflows.
   
2. Click on the workflow you want to update.
   
3. Go to the stage you want to edit permissions for, and click on “Stage transition and access rules” to expand the options.
   
4. Under the Users/roles who can edit the entry in this stage section, select the person or the role that you want to enable edit access (for example, Current stage user(s)).
   
5. Once you have made the changes, click on Save.

This ensures that only the users who are allowed to transition the entry stage from one to the other are allowed to edit the entry in that stage.

Read more about adding Workflow stages and setting edit access permissions for specific stages.