Force Edited posts back to pending review

  • We have a site with many authors, and the boss wants the department heads to approve all their employees’ posts before being published. Right now, Contributors are able to write a post and save it as pending review. The Editors then publish it, which is perfect.

    The bad thing is that Contributors can edit the post and put in whatever they want and save it, visible to the public, and that’s not good. So, I have removed the ability for Contributors to edit posts by adding some code in the functions.php file.

    It seems clunky to force someone to commit to something with no ability to change even a minor mistake. I would rather allow contributors to edit the post and save it as pending review again, for their boss to re-approve / re-publish.

    Is there a simple way to do this?

    Thanks!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hey @lucydog,

    As far as I understand from the WordPress Codex, Contributors can only write and manage their own posts but cannot publish. WordPress Codex (refer the above link) has a table to better explain the roles and their capabilities.

    The bad thing is that Contributors can edit the post and put in whatever they want and save it, visible to the public, and that’s not good.

    Do you mean to say, Contributors are able to publish posts?

    Thread Starter Jasper

    (@lucydog)

    Right, Contributors can manage their own posts but can’t publish, which is what we want.

    In WordPress, unless you remove this capability (as I have), Contributors may also edit their own posts and save them in Published status without forcing the post back into Pending Review status, which to me is a huge loophole.

    I was hoping there may be some code for me to allow Contributors to edit but save edited posts only as Pending Review status.

    @lucydog,

    I shall check this today and let you know.

    Hey Jasper (@lucydog),

    I tried the following scenario:

    1. Created a post as a Contributor and submitted for review.
    2. Logged in as Editor and tried to edit the post.
    3. WordPress applied Post Locking on the Contributor’s post and popped up a dialog asking to ‘Take Over’ the post for editing.
    4. When I (Editor) clicked ‘Take Over’, WordPress allowed to edit and publish.
    5. After taking over, I logged out and logged back in as Contributor and was able to only view the post and not edit.

    The message I’m trying to convey is that, after Editor/Admin takes over the post from the Contributor, the Contributors will not be able to edit/publish. So, you don’t have to worry about Contributors editing your published post. This Post Locking feature was introduced in WordPress 3.6.

    Kindly share the code that you introduced to modify this functionality. So I can check too see if I can help.

    Just saw this question and thought the following might help to streamline the editorial process..

    Oasis Workflow plugin allows you to create custom workflows and with the “Pro” version you can apply the same editorial workflow on the published posts. The contributors, revise the published posts, submit the changes to the workflow. The editors are notified about the change. They review it and if like it, the published post is updated with the new content. If they want more changes, they simply reject it and it goes back to the contributor for further changes.

    All these actions are captured for auditing purposes via workflow history.

    Give it a shot and see if it helps you to streamline your publishing process.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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