Content Moderation Workflow

Many people utilize MindTouch as a CMS (Content Management System), as it's flexible and powerful.  However, unlike many CMS's, MindTouch lacks a content moderation system out-of-the-box.  While MindTouch doesn't come with a moderation queue in the way that many CMS's do, with the following instructions you will be able to set up a Content Moderation Workflow in MindTouch.  

Establish Editors and Drafts Roles

The fundamental base of the MindTouch Content Moderation Workflow is permissioning.  This is similar to CMS's; you need to have contributors that add content, as well as editors that moderate the content.  For this article we'll setup 2 new roles.  The first role we'll title Editor, and add the following permissions to it: LOGIN, BROWSE, READ, SUBSCRIBE, UPDATE, CREATE, DELETE, CHANGEPERMISSIONS.  The second role will be Drafts, and we'll add the following permissions to it: LOGIN, BROWSE, READ, SUBSCRIBE, UPDATE, CREATE, DELETE.  Look at our User Manual for more information on creating Roles.  Once you have created the Roles, you can assign them to Users or Groups.  If you have a large amount of contributors, it would be best to establish a group and then apply that Role to the group.  

Create Tags and a Parent Page

Now that permissions have been created for the users, you will need to set up pages and tags so that an editor can get notified once a page has been added and needs to be reviewed.  Create a new page under the Hierarchy, and call it Not Approved. Apply Private Restrictions to that page and to all of its subchildren, excepting the users/groups that you stipulated in the previous step.  Next, create the tag "Needs Approval", and add it to the Parent Page "Not Approved".

Notify Users of new Space

Now the space has been permissioned as private, you can send out an email to the users that will be creating the drafts and let them know that they can add new pages to this space.  Since the space is Private and they don't have rights to change permissions, they can add content there without it being available to the public.  When the users are finished with their draft, all they have to do is add the tag "Needs Approval" to the page(s) they are working on.  

Editor Notification

Now that the users have marked pages as "Needs Approval", we need to make sure that the Editor receives the notification that there are pages they need to review; they can then make public or send it back to the users for revision.  The notification is tied into MindTouch's opensearch RSS feed.  To do this, first type the following into the MindTouch search box:

tag:"Needs Approval"

and click "Find".  This will bring up the results of pages tagged with "Needs Approval".  On the right side of the search results, there is a link called Subscribe to These Results.  Click that link, and it will display an RSS feed that you can put into your prefered RSS aggregator to receive notifications anytime a page is updated with the tag "Needs Approval". This allows you to monitor a dynamic Content Moderation Queue.