Khoros' Content Workflow feature in Khoros Communities enables you to create a comprehensive content workflow process including authors, editors, and publishers that each play an important role in crafting, editing, and publishing TKB and blog posts for your community.
This includes not only the crafting of new content but also to enable users to nominate, approve, and promote forum messages to TKB articles.
With Khoros Communities 21.1, we have introduced these features to Communities API v2. The additions are available during message creation and updates.
In this post, we'll uncover a few of the changes to the API, and you can use them to get more out of your Khoros Communities projects.
Content Workflow Roles
Contextual roles enable you to assign users access to various steps on the content workflow process. These roles break down at the most basic level to: author, editor, and publisher. That said, the permissions break down at a much more granular level. Here is a quick breakdown of the different contextual permissions a user can be assigned:
Within the user_context object (related to promoting a forum message to a TKB post):
- Nomination (First Step)
- can_nominate - Whether the authenticated user can nominate a forum topic to be converted into a knowledge base article.
- Approval (Second Step)
- can_approve - Whether the authenticated user can approve a forum topic's conversion to a knowledge base article.
- can_reject - Whether the authenticated user can reject the nomination of a forum topic's conversion to a knowledge base article.
- Promotion (Third Step)
- can_promote - Whether a user can start a TKB post from a forum message.
- can_schedule - Whether the user in the current context can schedule the post for publication.
Within the message_workflow_context object (related to new blog/TKB posts):
- Authoring (First Step)
- can_submit_for_review - Whether the user in the current context can submit the article for review.
- can_recall - Whether the user in the current context (usually the post's author) can recall the post directly back to the author.
- Editing/Review (Second Step)
- can_edit - Whether the user in the current context can edit the post.
- can_return_to_author - Whether the user in the current context can return the post to the author.
- can_submit_for_publication - Whether the user in the current context can submit the post for publication.
- Publishing (Third Step)
- can_publish - Whether the user in the current context can publish the post.
- can_return_to_review - Whether the user in the current context can return the post for review.
- can_schedule - Whether the user in the current context can schedule the publication of the post.
Content Workflow Actions
We've created a new Content Workflow object, which incorporates directly in the Create and Update Message endpoints. Using this object, you can set and update the status of messages as they progress through the content workflow process.
For example, a new post would have a save_draft or submit_for_review workflow action placed on it during its initial creation. This would either save the draft for future edits or label it as ready to review by an editor.
Those users, once the review is complete, can then update the message with a submit_for_publication or return_to_author workflow action to either pass the message on to a publisher or return the message to the author to edit and resubmit.
Finally, a publisher can apply a publish, schedule_publication, or return_to_editor workflow action to either publish the message, schedule a future publication, or return the message to the reviewer for additional review.
There are many different actions that can apply to a message throughout the process. You can find a list of them in our API reference.
LiQL Queries
We've added a host of new LiQL capabilities to support the content workflow feature. This will enable you to retrieve messages by their workflow status, determine a user's contextual permissions for a given message, and more.
We've updated the following LiQL reference pages:
We've added several new LiQL reference pages for the new content_workflow collection:
Use Cases
We've documented several use cases to introduce the new API features, as well as to bring some context to how these features work in practical application.
These use cases include:
- Nominate a Forum Message
- Review a Message
- Schedule Publication
- Submit a Blog or TKB Message for Review
The new Content Workflow API is available to Khoros Communities starting with release 21.1.
