If you haven’t upgraded yet, download it from the Plugin Directory or directly from within WordPress.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new features introduced in this release:

Usergroups

Version 0.3+ adds in what are called usergroups. On the outset, they’re similar to “Roles” built into WordPress, except that (at this stage) usergroups are simply ways to associate groups of users together. Edit Flow adds a number of sample usergroups for you to get started (as shown above) and get a sense of what sort of groupings you can create. However, the main power of usergroups comes with…

Notification Controls

Much of the feedback Edit Flow received since the email notification were introduced centered around having greater control over who receives notifications. Previously, post updates were emailed to authors, editorial commenters, and any roles that had been selected to receive notifications. Many people were drawn to the notification feature but were forced to keep it disabled since they didn’t want all their editors or administrators notified on every single post update.

With the new release, you can specify on a post level, what users and usergroups should receive notifications, so that only relevant individuals and groups of individuals receive updates.

Note: with the introduction of this feature the “Notify by Role” option was removed. In its place, a new feature was added “Always notify admin option” which includes the blog administrator in all notifications. To all overly protective, nosy admins that want to know everything: you’re welcome

This is just the beginning of notifications. Some interesting ideas that we’d like to integrate in future versions of Edit Flow include:

• Giving users the ability to subscribe to posts themselves
• Have specific users or usergroups automatically subscribed to posts based on categories or tags assinged to posts.
• Make the UI a bit more efficient. The UI for this new feature is something that was unfortunately rushed. My original vision didn’t quite make it in (due to various impracticalities, changes, and lack of time), but it’s very much a high priority on my list to make it easy to select users/usergroups (especially for installs with hundreds and thousands of users).

More Useful Notifications

On the topic of notifications, the new release introduces emails that are slightly more descriptive in terms of the action taken on the post. The subject line of the email will specify whether the post was created, published, unpublished, etc. Although a small change, it should hopefully help users manage incoming emails more effectively and not get inundated with a barrage of “Post Status was changed” emails. (Interestingly, I’ve found that this new change comes in handy even on my personal blog which is a simple on-user blog. I find these notifications fairly useful especially since I make aggresive use of WordPress’ future scheduling functionality.)

Additionally, the action links in comment notifications now take the user directly to the editorial comment form (e.g. clicking on “Add editorial comment” will open the post and take to directly to the Editorial Comment form). Again, not a major feature but something that should hopefully save you some time, scrolling and future dealings with Carpal Tunnel.

I’d like to extend this feature even further and allow users to reply to comments via email and not have to go into WordPress to do so. (As you can see, there’s a bit a time-saving trend going on here.)

New widget: Posts I’m Following

Still a little crude at this stage, this new widget gives you a list of the most recently updated posts that you’re following. However, this widget will likely form the basis of the activity stream, which will provide an audit trail of activity happening within the WordPress admin.

Knight News Challenge Round II

While not really a feature introduced in 0.3+, here’s a bit of news that may be interest: we’ve submitted our 2nd round application for the Knight News Challenge. Check out it, vote, and leave us some feedback.

What’s Next?

Apart from some of the ideas already mentioned, with the next couple of Edit Flow releases, you can expect to see some great features such as:

• Post task lists (a la Basecamp, namely a list of tasks that must be completed in order for a post to be published)
• Better Post Management (to help you track and manage your content better, such as snapshots of how far along existing content is)
• HTML emails (because emails should always be pretty — but always fallback to plain text for people still living in the ’90s)

Your Homework

As always, your feedback is much appreciated and vital to our development. Let us know what about Edit Flow works for you and what doesn’t and what else Edit Flow can do to improve your organization’s WordPress experience.

We’ve already had discussions with several online and print publishers and newsrooms interested in adopting Edit Flow and would love to include you in that conversation. Why not get in touch?

After a long hiatus, CoPress finally released v0.2 of Edit Flow this past weekend. Those who have it installed should have seen a notification to update; for those who haven’t jumped on the Edit Flow bandwagon yet, grab it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

We’ve got some cool new features in this new version, outlined below:

Post Metadata

Some basic fields have been added to allow users to capture additional newsroom-related data for each article. While it’s pretty sparse right now, the feature is something we’d like to flesh out once we get further details on how people hope to use this functionality. Additionally, it ties in really well to QuickPitch (described below). The fields we’ve added include:

• Description
• Due Date
• Location

Quick Pitch

A near-clone of the QuickPress Dashboard widget, the idea behind this was to allow reporters to propose new story ideas conveniently from the WordPress dashboard. Submitting a new pitch using QuickPitch creates a new post with the post metadata populated (based on the fields entered) and assigned the default custom status specified in your Edit Flow settings. The cool thing here is that an email notification is automatically triggered when a new pitch is created. (Notifications described below.) With the next release we’d like to add more control over who gets QuickPitch notifications as well as a template tag to make it visible on the front end.

Editorial Comments

Edit Flow now supports editorial comments. With this feature, discussions on posts/articles can now take place between editorial staff within the WordPress administration interface. This can cut down on long-winded back-and-forth email threads as all comments are conveniently displayed within the Edit Posts page to better facilitate online workflows. Threading is supported (assuming it’s enabled on your site — to enable threading, turn on the option to “Enable threaded (nested) comments” found under Settings > Discussion). We display gravatars for all users.

Notifications

Basic email notification support has been added, as well. Email notifications are delivered when a post’s status changes or when an editorial comment is added to a post (see screenshots above and below). Notifications are delivered to:

• Post author and Administrators, by default;
• Any specified roles (under Edit Flow > Settings); and
• Any users that comment on posts.

As with QuickPitch, we’d like to introduce the ability for more granular control over who gets post notifications, such as the ability for users to click a button to follow a post, or for notifications to be delivered to certain users based on the category of each post.

Internationalization

As promised, support for internationalization has been included in Edit Flow v0.2. For anyone interested in translations, the POT file is included in the plugin when you download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory. It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there. If you have a translation that you’d like to share, please send it to us and we’ll gladly include it in future releases of the plugin.

Phase 3 and onward

Okay, so what’s next? We’ve got some ideas that have already outlined above. Outside of that, we’re looking at things such as additional Dashboard widgets (e.g. editorial comments), personalized activity streams and RSS feeds, and maybe taking a crack at some of the bigger workflow pieces (e.g. user groups). We’ve deviated a fair bit from our original plans but we’re still on track to continue building Edit Flow and improving the WordPress admin interface for newsrooms.

What we need to move forward, though, is your feedback. Are you using Edit Flow? Let us know what about Edit Flow works for you and what doesn’t. Not using it? We’d love to hear why not. Finally, what other areas of the WordPress admin do you think we could help improve for your newsroom or multi-author blog?

We’re all ears.

The main goal of this stage was to “improve posts statuses by allowing custom statuses.” WordPress, by default, only allows for two statuses for posts during the editing process: “Draft” and “Pending Review”. These statuses are not very descriptive nor do they make it easy to track a story as it moves through a newsroom’s often complex, multi-level workflow.

With the release of Stage 1 of Edit Flow, WordPress users can now assign custom statuses to posts, giving them more control over the state of their content.

Adding/Editing/Managing Custom Statuses

Upon activation, the plugin adds five default statuses (“Assigned”, “Draft”, “Pending Review”, “Pitch”, “Waiting for Feedback”). These can all be edited or deleted (with the exception of “Draft” and “Pending Review”, which can only be deleted). Users can also add additional custom statuses. Overall, we tried to make this as flexible as possible, acknowledging the extreme diversity in workflows and requirements across different newsrooms.

The “Add/Edit/Manage Custom Statuses” screen (screenshot above) is reminiscent of the interface used to manage categories and tags. From a design stand-point, we tried to keep with standard WordPress interface conventions (to minimize the learning curve) and, similarly, make the plugin as less intrusive as possible.

Assigning Custom Statuses to Posts

With custom statuses defined, they can now be assigned to posts. The plugin adds the custom statuses to the “Status” dropdown when editing a post (screenshot above). Additionally, given the likely frequency of use of this feature, the Status dropdown is made visible by default. The plugin also allows you to set a default status for new posts, which WordPress sets to “Draft” by default.

Managing Posts

To ease the management of content, a new column is added to the Edit/Manage Posts screen that indicates the current status of the posts displayed. Additionally, the posts on this screen can be filtered by status, by clicking on the links at the top.

Dashboard Widget

As a small bonus, we threw in a small dashboard widget that gives you a quick glance of the state of currently unpublished content. As this was a last minute addition, it’s minimal and largely unstyled, but something we’ll clean up and build out more in the coming days.

Version Compatibility and Internationalization

The plugin relies heavily on JavaScript, and given recent changes to the core, we’ve decided to only support WordPress 2.8 onwards. If there is enough demand for backwards compatibility, we may consider supporting older versions. For now, and the remainder of the plugin, we will be focusing on compatibility with WordPress 2.8+. Additionally, internationalization isn’t currently supported, but something we hope to build into the next Stage of the plugin.

Download

You can find Stage 1 of the plugin on the WordPress Plugin Directory. Alternatively, download it from within WordPress using the built-in Plugin Manager (just search for “Edit Flow”).

Feedback and What’s Next

As this is the first official (albeit beta) release of Edit Flow, it is likely still rough around the edges. We’re very open to feedback though. Leave a comment below telling us what you think is broken, missing, or could be improved. (Praise doesn’t hurt either). Alternatively, feel free to submit any issues or requests that you run into on our GitHub page.

Up next, Daniel will be leading efforts for Stage 2 (Additional Post Meta Data) of the plugin, which will be working to add newsroom specific meta-data to posts. Stay tuned to our progress as we work through Stage 2.