Create your own Press Release approval system

By Bob North on 21 January 2010

Last time I looked at a simple approval system for a blog comment – basically adding a checkbox that only the admin can see.

Today I’ll look at a more complex scenario, more suitable for a Press Release. In this scenario we want the Press Release to be approved by three people: one checking grammar, another the technical content, and, once approved on those aspects, a final approval by the CEO.

For this we’ll use three checkboxes, named: Grammar, Technical, and CEO.

To underpin this, the site needs to have four usergroups (in addition to the built-in Visitor usergroup): These we’ll name: Editor, Grammar-Editor, Technical-Editor, and CEO

For each usergroup we create a Data Entry Form, which shows the text of the press release, and, for Grammar-Editor, Technical-Editor and CEO, shows their respective checkboxes.

When the Editor has submitted the Press Release, the system sends an email to all members of the Grammar-Editor and Technical-Editor usergroups. No need to bother the busy CEO at this stage.

When either the Grammar-Editor or the Technical-Editor save the record, the system checks to see if they have both approved it yet, and only if they have both approved it, an email is sent to the CEO asking for final approval.

Once the CEO has approved it, the Press Release can be published. This is achieved by simply adding the criteria to the Query embedded on the page, to see if the CEO checkbox is checked.

Note that it probably isn’t sensible to add criteria here to ensure that the Technical-Editor and Grammar-Editor have approved it. This should have happened anyway as part of the workflow before it reached the CEO, but even if it hadn’t you probably want to allow a side-flow so that if the CEO wants to approve something and get it released, then it happens, no matter what anyone else thinks!

For those of you familiar with the free neatComponents system, it goes without saying that all this configuration is done without writing a single line of code, without any Linux haikus, and without breaking a sweat. If you’re new to the system see www.neatcomponents.com
 

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Creating a moderated comments system

By Bob North on 20 January 2010

Here’s a quick trick that will make life easy when you want to keep control over what is be added to your site. I’m going to skip over the basic Content Management approval controls, which are documented elsewhere, and look at the form-based techniques that give you even more flexibility over your approval processes.

Let’s start with a simple typical scenario – a blog with a comments section, where you want to allow anyone to post a comment, but you want to approve (ie moderate) the posting before it shows up on the site. Later on we’ll extend this example to more complex setups, but this will explain the fundamentals.

So, for our blog, the comment postings will be stored in a neatComponents Form – with the usual fields of Comment text, Date, Posting (that it refers to), and so on.

The trick is to add a checkbox field, called say ‘Publish’, which is unchecked by default.

Then, when the Query that displays the comments is embedded on the page, add a criteria to only show records where the Publish checkbox field is checked.

Naturally it’s important that (a) the writer of the comment doesn’t see the Publish checkbox – or they could approve their own postings(!), and (b) the site administrator does get to see the Publish checkbox, to approve them.

This is achieved by using two Data Entry Forms, both linked to the same underlying Comment Form. The first one is public facing, and doesn’t contain the Publish checkbox, whilst the other does show it, and has its Permissions set to only allow the site admin to access it.

For added sophistication it’s a trivial step to add an email to the Public Data Entry Form that sends the admin an email to alert when a comment needs moderating.

In my next posting I’ll be building on this simple example to look at scenarios where an item (probably not a blog comment, but, for example, a Press Release) needs to be approved by several people.


For those of you familiar with the free neatComponents system, it goes without saying that all this configuration is done without writing a single line of code, without any Linux haikus, and without breaking a sweat. If you’re new to the system see www.neatcomponents.com

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