I need help with some wording from an editor’s / content person’s view. When the review workflow is enabled, certain editors can’t publish their content to live directly. So instead of the “Publish” button, they will see a different button which allows them to transfer the changes of their own user workspace (the one where anything he types is stored in immediately) to another workspace which acts as a container for changes. This “container” can then be sent to review and a reviewers can publish these changes to live.
Now, I’m looking for a few words:
how would you call the collection of changes which will be sent to review? In technical terms (Git etc) we’d call it a commit. You might also call it a change set
how would you call the action of saving / transferring / committing your changes to that change set? I’m looking for a label for the button, so it should be short. “Apply to change set” … something like that.
It’s tricky, but I think we need to find some clear meaning and usage rules for terms like “change”, “workspace”, “publish” etc.
Magnolia calls workflow tasks “work items”. I tend to just call 1) a “change” and would even call the action “commit to change”, because that is, literally, what is happening.
but “review” is a process, or maybe a “department”. But what do you send to review? A pile of bytes, technically. A reporter would send an article to an editor for a review, but I need a more generic term than article.
yes it is a process, but also a (short version for a) state in the publishing process, like “ready to review” … so maybe something like “save changes to review” or just “send to review”
I’m all with you that the workflow action should be called “sent to review”. Still, what do you send to review? Under the hood, what we send to review is actually a workspace. We could call it a workspace, too in the user interface, which would mean that you have workflow actions like:
send (workspace) to review
start new workspace
delete workspace
…
But it sounds quite technical and workspace is certainly not used in the domain of content authors, editors and reviewers.
@sebastian yes, that’s also my favourite right now. However, we have to find a solution for the currently existing menu items in the publish dropdown and workspace module:
discard all changes
publish all changes
Change sounds nice and simple, but is a bit weak when you combine it with the workspace actions we have. Changeset would be easier to distinguish from the generic change.
If you use the workspace feature for reviews only, I’d be in favor of approval. But I think it can/will be used for other scenarios too, like “stashing” in git. So I’d go for an even more generic name like release (for the action button). change is a bit misleading IMO because the word is already used for single non-published modifications. I can’t think of a better word but maybe something along the lines of version, snapshot or branch?
Thank you for pointing me to Prismic again! I almost forgot about their concept of Content Releases. This is really important to consider while designing the overall concept of workspaces and the approval mechanism!
Actually, it would make sense to introduce “Content Releases” at a later stage which allows authors / editors to collect changes (technically: in a shared workspace) and then publish them collectively. You should be able to
publish content to live right away
publish content to live at some point in time
collect content in a content release
collect content and submit that to a reviewer for approval
Let’s see what’s the shortest path is to get a good approval feature implemented …
I also think that forming something based on words like: change, content release, publish, review and approval would make most sense from an editor’s point of view.
A bit late to the game here, but I’d suggest to check out the terminology Gather Content has come up with. They call it revisions and a revision can have a certain status, e.g. draft, review (department), review (corporate) & approved. A revision is saved and the status can be changed as permissions allows it. For all entries you are have an activity log, can revert to revisions, comment, see contributors & add notes.
