[Plugin: Edit Flow] Authors limited to submitting posts with only the Draft status

And just to clarify, I suppose my main issue isn’t that authors can’t choose their post’s status. Technically they have drafts that they can submit for review, and that flow works just fine. But most potential posts start out as “ideas” or “pitches”, and if nothing else I’d like to be able to make that the post status that authors are using when creating a new post.

Thanks for the report, Ryan. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of WordPress core, not Edit Flow.

Specifically, if you remove “publish_posts” for a user, they’re presented with a different post submit box.

Without replicating and rewriting that entire piece of code in Edit Flow, I think we can come to a happy medium by modifying the post submit box seen by users without the ‘publish_posts’ cap. Two options:

• Let them save to the first status in their workflow or submit to the second
• Give them a dropdown of post statuses, and let them save to any status but remove the “Submit” button and language entirely

What do you think? I’ve filed this as a Pivotal story for v0.7.1

Thanks Daniel, I’m glad to see it’s on the radar.

For our workflow, the second option would be better and it would be more flexible in general in my opinion.

I actually started hacking away last night on something similar to option two and managed to get it working quite well by using jQuery to hide the submit for review button and insert a new select, mimicking the default post box. If you’re interested in looking at the code or I could contribute to getting this done let me know!

We’d love to see a code contribution! I’d recommend forking our master repo, and then making the changes necessary in your repo to get it working. Once you’ve done so, let me know and I’ll take a look.

Specifically, I’d look for an approach that:

• Produces the standard UX for changing a status for users without ‘publish_posts’ cap
• Hides the submit for review button
• Enables the custom status dropdown for Quick Edit without the publishing options

Github has a useful help site if you need some tips and tricks.

Hello Daniel,

I echo what pnews’ thoughts on the second of your two suggestions. For my needs, allowing them to select a post status from a drop-down and save it (remove the submit button) would work great for me.

Thanks.

“select a post status from a drop-down”
I think it’s a very good idea. Adds a bit more to the plugin features, without hacking into WP core.
It’s great to see these sort of plugins coming into WordPress.

Just an FYI…

As a temporary solution, I installed the Adminimize plugin and removed the “Publish” button from the main edit/write post page. This prevents a user from being able to publish a post even though the user has publish_posts permissions. They can still select a custom status and save the post.

It’s probably not the best approach, but it works for now.

I just ran into this as well. I assume it’s because Contributors don’t have publish_posts permission. So, I’m upgrading them to Author for the interim.

I also vote for the second solution that allows the selection of any status and saving, even though that doesn’t keep strict adherence to a workflow. That way, if an error is made in selecting a status, Contributors can back up (e.g., from Pending Review to Draft).

This is implemented in v0.7.2: https://editflow.org/2012/07/03/v0-7-2-custom-statuses-for-contributors/