CoPress

This past weekend, we released the beta version of Stage 1 (Custom Post Statuses) of the Edit Flow Project, a plugin aiming to improve the WordPress Admin Interface for a multi-user newsroom’s editorial workflow.

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.

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Lauren Rabaino published a constructive blog post a couple days ago on how the Mustang Daily is adjusting to a web-first workflow. From the looks of it, they’re asking and answering a number of questions that other news organizations will behaving further along the line:

Who copy edits when? Does the section editor look at the article first or last? Can an article be posted to the Web without the section editor’s approval? These are the questions we’ve asked ourselves these past few days. Section editors (news, arts, sports) have a huge problem with articles being posted to the Web without their approval. Gradually, we’re figuring it out.

Related to this, several of us had a conference call this morning to discuss ways in which the WordPress admin could be enhanced for editorial workflow (and address many of the technical issues organizations like the Mustang Daily are facing). For instance, I think it would be useful if editors could receive an email when a post is ready for their reading, as well as different types of statuses if, for instance, the editor needed to send the post back to the reporter for a rewrite.