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?

Investigative multimedia site from McKenna Ewen

McKenna Ewen, a multimedia journalist at the University of Minnesota, is doing an investigative piece about a journalist’s mysterious death in Minneapolis in 1945. This winter break, he’s putting together a custom site and documentary about the story. Ewen says:

[Investigative reporter James Shiffer] approached me in August about helping build the project into a website and making a short documentary of it. I agreed and made it part of my senior thesis, which is about increasing video views on the web. We’re going to launch project independently and see how much traffic we can pull in without an advertising budget (it should be interesting).

The anticipated publish date is early in January (we’ll link you to it when it launches). Update: This post originally stated the project was part of a collaboration with the Star Tribune. It is not.

Development continues on Nando from Max Cutler, Rob Baskin, and Andrew Spittle

Yale student Max Cutler has been working on a workflow tool for the administrative side of the Courant News CMS, code named “Nando.” A few features for the tool include a pitch system, a workflow based around statuses and user roles, and a heavily customizable dashboard for all of this activity. He’s recruited CoPress’ Andrew Spittle to continue development on the project over winter break. You can hear more about what they’ll be working on specifically at today’s Hacking The News workshop.

SR2 Blog from Josh Halliday

Josh Halliday, a journalism student at the University of Sunderland, is starting a project for community-based blogging as part of his final project. From the blog’s about page:

SR2 Blog is the new community-run neighbourhood news website, dedicated to the SR2 area of Sunderland.

We’re recruiting community reporters who either want to keep their neighbours on top of what’s going on down their street or vent on an issue that’s not being dealt with. If you live, work or know SR2 why not get involved?

SR2Blog features news broken down by neighborhood, video, liveblogs, and social media. The project is an interesting experiment in -hyperlocal, community-generated news and we’ll be interested to watch its progression.

EditFlow updates from Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis

Edit Flow is a WordPress plugin being developed by Mo Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Scott Bressler and Will Davis to help tailor the CMS’s workflow for an editorial environment. Although the first few phases of the project have already been released, the plugin is still actively in development. Here’s what they’ll will be working on this winter as part of the next phase (via the CoPress wiki):

• More granular email notifications, including the ability to have a notification go to a predefined group of people
• User groups with functionality to define specific groups of users within WordPress.
• Visualization of the editorial workflow data within WordPress, let it be through a calendar view, an activity stream, or other.
• The ability to define newsroom-specific metadata for each post.
• Functionality to allow custom definition of a required set of actions for each piece. These could be “copy-edit,” “fact-check,” etc.

SB Statesman redesign and restructuring from Bradley Donaldson

The SB Statesman — the student newsorg at Stony Brook University in New York – has a winter goal that every student publication can and should be pursuing this break: redesigning and resturcturing their site. From editor-in-chief, Bradley Donaldson, here are a few goals they have:

• Create a website that has a greater focus on multimedia.
• Make the site much more user-friendly and student-centered
• Harness social media to both spread the word about the newspaper and have a presence in student communities

What I really like about this redesign project is that it’s not a feat accomplished by a few web editors, but the staff as a whole. Donaldson said they’re finally taking a step they’ve neglected in the past:

Fortunately we have a good number of staffers who are interested in helping out with this, and the entire newsroom on a whole is excited about the changes being made. We’ve neglected our online presence too much or been very inconsistent with it in the past, even though we had the manpower and know-how to really improve it.

Full disclosure: The Statesman plans to launch its new redesign on CoPress’ Managed Hosting plan.

If you want to hear about what’s going on specifically with Edit Flow, Nando and Courant News, or just want some feedback on what you’re working on now’s the chance: join today’s Hacking the Student Newsroom session. The session will be run through TalkShoe so just call (724) 444-7444 at 4 p.m. PST and enter the Call ID when asked (it’s 67693).

An example of a situation when The Maine Campus had to adapt to appeal to both Web and print audiences.

One factor is whether you view your paper as a daily news organization with a print newspaper once or twice a week, or as a weekly newspaper with a Web-first workflow. At The Campus, we’re fairly new to Web-first reporting, so we’ve made a decision to continue to tailor our print edition to our print readers. Sometimes this means taking the latest story we’ve posted to the Web and adding additional context grafs from earlier stories so readers who haven’t been following the story online aren’t lost. As we get more used to writing for the Web first, I expect we’ll get used to treating every day like a new issue of the paper, even if we don’t have a print edition coming out that day, and we’ll expect readers to check our Web site every day for new stories and updates.

Other papers have already embraced the latter. The Washington Square News, the student newspaper at New York University, bills itself as a daily even though it only publishes four days a week in print. On Fridays it publishes online and expects readers to stay tuned to the Web site one day a week, at least.

The WSN doesn’t publish any of Friday’s stories in Monday’s paper unless new information breaks, making it one of the most Web-reliant college papers out there. Only once in the year or so since WSN moved to Web-only on Friday has the paper put out a special issue — when members of a radical student group called Take Back NYU barricaded themselves inside one of the student centers for more than 24 hours.

Here are a few basic things to consider when deciding how to handle articles that are published on the Web long before print:

1. If there is any change in the news — any sort of breaking detail — it should probably get its own post. Not only will Google News not re-index the article after it’s been initially published but this also enables readers to easily identify when there have been major developments.
2. Be sure you know your audience. Use Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your site, when and what they read.
3. If you go Web-first, be sure to stress to both your Web and print readers that you post articles online every day. Truly Web-first newspapers should have a steady stream of readers on their Web sites, not a giant spike of traffic the day the newspaper comes out. Convince your readers the Web site is more than just a carbon copy of your paper edition.

If you can build up your online readership by building up expectations of what will be offered, as WSN has done by cutting out a day of the print edition, papers can effectively use their Web sites as extensions of their print editions. Smaller papers will have to build a bridge between their print and online audience before readers will come to expect multiple updates online.

The most important thing is to make sure you don’t leave your readers confused. A final idea is to refer to your Web site in print with something like, “For more information on such and such, visit mainecampus.com.”

First, an overview

We’ve used Edit Flow’s ability to define custom status to create a 5 step online workflow that, for us, works quite well. Stories go from reporter drafts to pending the review of an editor. From there the editor can send it back to the reporter if the story needs further review or they can send it along to the copy editors. Our two copy editors then each take a look at the article and the article goes from “Copy Edited Once” to “Ready for Web.”

As soon as things are marked as ready for publication, our Web editor uploads any graphics for the piece and makes sure that the article is categorized and tagged properly. Once this is done, things are published online on a rolling basis.

The editorial team is sent an email at each point in this workflow so that everyone is in the loop regarding what is going on.

Making Edit Flow better

The recent update to the plugin has made it exponentially more useful for our student newsroom. While it now encompasses the core functions that the Pioneer needs for an online workflow, there are still some things that would be nice to have:

• User Groups - It would be great to have the ability to categorize reporters and editors into section-specific user groups. This would largely be a way to replicate the existing staff structure but would go along well with…
• Fine-Tuned Email Controls - Right now, every editorial staff member receives the emails for all articles. This can be a bit overwhelming when 20 or 30 articles are going through the editorial process. What would be great would be to define who receives emails for each user group. In other words we could create a “Sports” user group where only members of that group received emails about articles in that section.
• An “At-A-Glance” View - While the standard list of posts in WordPress is great for most needs, it would be wonderful to have a page within the dashboard where one could see more detailed information on where things stand for the week.
• Photography and Illustration Assignments - The one thing that we have not transferred to online with this workflow is story assignments. This is largely because right now we don’t have a great way to track photo and illustration assignments within WordPress. If this were to be incorporated into Edit Flow then we could have a really killer online workflow.

Ultimately, the first 5 weeks with Edit Flow have been a wonderful boon to our online workflow. Whereas last year we were spending anywhere from 3 to 6 hours uploading content every week, we are now spending less than an hour to put together all the photos and illustrations and publish everything online. Quite simply, it has allowed us to direct focus elsewhere. Because of the time saved with Edit Flow we now have some much larger projects in the works that will be coming soon.

“We want to position ourselves as the center of community while at the same time driving out hateful, hurtful and trollish commenters,” said Jack Lail, Director of News Innovation at the Knoxville News Sentinel, in an email. “It has proven difficult to say the least.”

One of the great things about the Web is that it allows anyone to comment what they think — but perhaps the biggest downfall to that is many of these comments are crude, malicious, self-promotional or plainly irrelevant.

“Many people do not care that we are students and that we are not yet professionals, so many mature readers bash our writers for their opinions or uneducated writing,” wrote Chris Ullyott, Webmaster at The Daily Titan. “ Sometimes it can be pretty discouraging.”

At the Los Angeles Times, too, Blog Editor Tony Pierce reported that one to two users a week on average are banned from ever commenting again. This is especially prevalent in stories about politics, immigration and sports, where readers have a tendency to bicker at each other rather than commenting on the story itself.

“We want to get readers’ opinions up as quickly as possible to engage in discussion,” said Pierce. “It’s very valuable to hear their point of view.”

And while papers strive for diverse opinions, there’s a fine line between running an active-user site and becoming a user-run site.

“There are a lot of places on the Internet for people to express themselves so we don’t feel we are stopping them [by monitoring comments],” Pierce relayed. “ We want to make a quality discussion.”

At The Daily Titan, computers pre-screen comments, weeding out spam and advertisement links.

“We try to create an environment friendly to users of all ages,” said Ullyott. “We do not moderate comments but we do employ a strict blacklist of “no-no words.”

Apart from software, with the July launch of the E.W. Scripps’ Asphalt Design, the Knoxville News Sentinel changed the way they manage users, this time concentrating on abnormal user activity.

“We are reviewing comments of users who just signed up,” said Lail. “And those who may have been registered for some time, but suddenly started commenting.”

Some newspapers, however, still manually monitor comments. Even with three editors to divvy up the task, Pierce spends about an hour a day pre-screening each comment that users leave on every article on the Los Angeles Times and the LA Now blog sites.

But in the digital age of endless deadlines and dwindling resources, monitoring may fall last on the to-do list. Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Robert J. Lopez attests to this.

“Stuff just falls through the cracks,” said Lopez. “The reality is there isn’t much personnel to do all that, especially when news breaks.”

Which raises the questions: why do newspapers still include comments when resources are scarce and editors could be using their time doing more quality journalism? And is creating a quality discussion equivalent to quality journalism?

Similar questions were brought up at the APME Online Credibility Workshop last May, an effort Knoxville News Sentinel initiated to reach a consensus on when to remove commenters and ban users.

“A certain percentage of users feel the comments area are their area and not ours,” said Lail.  “And a certain other percentage of users hold us responsible, at least in part, for everything that is posted on the Website.”

Perhaps the answer to this dialectic problem lies in having readers participate in the monitoring process.

The OC Register implemented a policy that gives readers the ability to silence commenters through flagging, said Online Quality Checker Carol Priest. For users who find a comment objectionable, a “remove comment” button appears next to every post. OC Register revised its policy two years ago — it now takes only two readers for a post to come down.

Following policies like that of MinnPost — which holds their readers accountable by requiring that they register and use their full name to comment — may free up editors and actually encourage constructive dialogue.

On another hand, the inconsistency with commenting policies may stem from news organizations not fully accepting user-generated content. According to a recent article, Dr. Piet Bakker found in his study about Dutch newspapers and user-generated content that the news value of comments is nominal. News organizations tend to use comments not for their newsworthiness but as a way to drive traffic and keep users coming back. Perhaps before a news organization decides on its commenting policy, it should redefine its relationship with the audience and embrace participatory journalism.

Which of these cases is closest to how your news organization handles comments? Is it time to start rethinking and reframing this essential part of Web culture? Take this opportunity to sound off in — you guessed it — the comments.

Useful links:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=103&aid=123290

http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

http://www.wiredjournalists.com/forum/topics/worth-talking-about-do-you

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/roll/2009/06/last-week-we-put-up.html

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.

• Make sure your WordPress site is up to date with 2.8.4, the most recent version. Yesterday afternoon, Lorelle, a significant voice in the WordPress community, reported that older versions were under attack. There are two reported signatures of a hacked blog: funky permalinks including the keywords “eval” or “base64_decode,” or an extra administrator in your database that doesn’t show up in the WordPress admin. The exploit that the hacker is using has been patched for a while, and should only affect those who haven’t updated their site recently. Making sure your WordPress site is up to date is one of the best ways of keeping it secure.
• On a related WordPress note, johnl1479 says: FYI: #PodPress 8.8.1 breaks thumbnail capability of #Wordpress MU 2.8.4a.
• An alumni assesses the recently relaunched Eagle at American University and identifies some of the value it’s offering her. Good ideas that you should pay attention to.
• Andrew Robinson found success adding the Facebook Connect plugin to the WKU Herald website. Facebook apparently only allows one connection at a time, and having the Fan Box Widget on the site as well caused issues.
• Through Twitter, I found out about @WiredResearch, a Twitter account that teases the facts of upcoming articles. It would be way cool to see this on a super-local level.
• VentureBeat has an inside scoop on the editorial workflow of The New York Times blogs. Posts that are ready to go are marked “Pending Review”, and notifications are still by email.
• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – The web is actually reviving literacy and pushing it in “bold new directions.”

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:

Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.

Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.

Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.

If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.

Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.

Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.

Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.

Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.

Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.

The Daily Tar Heel switched to Drupal, Sara Gregory says, because is more compatible with paper’s existing structure, size and content. She’s making online publication simpler by eliminating copy editors and desk editors from the process. Now only one desk level and one management editor read each online story before publication. Thanks to the redesign, readers can now subscribe to two different newsletters (regular and breaking news) and choose from numerous RSS feed options. The paper’s staff also added a new Community Manager position that is responsible for both of the paper’s regular and breaking news Twitter accounts as well as its Facebook account. Gregory’s upcoming projects include incorporating major linking within stories.

Will Davis made the transition to WordPress MU because he wanted The Maine Campus to have a variety of plug-ins and the potential to build a blog community. He set up custom-user permissions so writers post drafts to the Web site as well as a plug-in that emails staff when a draft is posted, cutting down the workflow to just two steps. The site also has a RSS feed for the entire site and newsletter for subscribers. Davis is in the works of launching “Campus Currents,” a user-generated wiki-based community site, and a user-generated restaurant guide. He hopes to integrate more multimedia production and interactivity online in the near future.

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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.