Associating workflow with content types Hi

Actor: Site Manager

The business rules that encapsulate your publishing requirements are represented in the CMF by workflow objects. Each workflow object dictates the steps that a piece of content goes through while progressing through its lifecycle. Generally such steps include being published and culminiate in expiration.

Content types can each be associated with a potentially different workflow object. Workflow objects are defined by workflow designers in the CMF Workflow Tool. Once one or more workflows have been defined in the Workflow Tool, you can then draw an association between a content type and a workflow.

The CMF comes with a default workflow that is associated with all of the built-in content types. The default workflow is a simple review and publish workflow that requires a reviewer to check content before it is made generally visible on the site.

To change the workflow associations among the types of content on your site, visit the Zope management interface of the CMF Site object that represents your site. The "Contents" view a CMF Site object lists a number of "tool" objects, including the Workflow Tool which is named "portal_workflow" in the contents listing. Click on the "portal_workflow" tool to navigate the Workflow Tool.

The "Overview" tab of the Workflow Tool provides a basic description of the tool. To view the current set of associations between workflows and content types, click the "Workflows" tab.

This will bring up a form with two columns. On the left are listed the content types in use on your site. On the right of each is a textbox containing the name or names of the workflows associated with that content type.

To change the workflow association for a content type, type the name of the workflow to use in the textbox and click the "Change" button. If you wish to specify multiple workflows for a particular content type, type the names of the workflows to use in the textbox, separated by commas. If you need to find out the names of the workflows that are currently defined in the Workflow Tools, click on the "Contents" tab of the tools, which will list the available Workflow objects.

If you have never changed the workflow associations for your content types, the value will be the special value "(Default)". Note that there is also an entry "(Default)" at the bottom of the left-hand column listing the available content types. This is a convenience that lets you easily change the "default" workflow to be used without having to update the value for every content type individually. The content types whose value is (Default) will use the workflow named by the (Default) item at the bottom of the form.

After you have finished changing workflow operations, you must click the "Update security settings" button at the bottom of the workflow mapping form. Workflow often has side effects on the security settings of the objects they are associated with that need to be reconciled when the workflow mappings change. Doing the reconciliation is a potentially time-consuming operation, so rather than slow down the process of re-mapping workflow by doing it for each item changed, you click "Update security settings" when you are done making changes to the workflow associations.