I'm trying to replace an old Joomla website that had a version control plugin for site content. This was very useful for my employers, who wanted employees to be able to edit their own department pages, but for an editor in the communications department to review their edits before they went live, because not everyone is a great or attentive writer and they didn't want grammar mistakes to be made live.

Are there any plugins for Wordpress that allow the following workflow:

• User edits existing page (not limited to posts)
• User hits save
• Updates are saved but not published; the live page remains on the previous version
• Admins are notified by email of the edits
• Admins approve the edit, at which point it becomes live OR Admins amend the edit before making it live OR Admins reject the edit.

There are plugins that do vaguely similar things, but are there any that do exactly this?

I'm trying to replace an old Joomla website that had a version control plugin for site content. This was very useful for my employers, who wanted employees to be able to edit their own department pages, but for an editor in the communications department to review their edits before they went live, because not everyone is a great or attentive writer and they didn't want grammar mistakes to be made live.

Are there any plugins for Wordpress that allow the following workflow:

• User edits existing page (not limited to posts)
• User hits save
• Updates are saved but not published; the live page remains on the previous version
• Admins are notified by email of the edits
• Admins approve the edit, at which point it becomes live OR Admins amend the edit before making it live OR Admins reject the edit.

There are plugins that do vaguely similar things, but are there any that do exactly this?

• plugins

Share Improve this question asked Jan 9, 2019 at 15:38 AmbulareAmbulare 12133 bronze badges

Add a comment  | 

2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default 3

Unfortunately, WP Core does not support this type of workflow. Plugin requests are considered off-topic here because plugin functionality can change and some plugins don't last, but I think it would be helpful to the community (and OP) to know that Oasis Workflow satisfies these basic requirements. The downside is, the editors who can't publish end up being able to edit all post types. So, if you have a more complex workflow where you want some editors to edit only specific post types, you're out of luck with that plugin and will have to code a solution yourself.

WP Core will be tackling workflow (at long last) in phase 3 or 4 of Gutenberg development, currently set for early 2020. Hopefully enough of the community will be vocal about this type of requirement, which is common to many CMSs and has long been difficult to shoehorn in.

You don't need a plugin to do this.

Set the user role for people creating posts/pages that you don't want to actually "publish" the content to "Contributor".

The only down side to this is a contributor can't upload images. If you need them to upload images you can add that functionality back into the contributor role. Just run the following code in your functions.php file once, check a contributor to make sure it worked, then remove the code.

function allow_contributor_uploads() {
    $contributor = get_role('contributor');
    $contributor->add_cap('upload_files');
}
if ( current_user_can('contributor') && !current_user_can('upload_files') ) {
    add_action('admin_init', 'allow_contributor_uploads');
}

If you are already using the contributor role and don't want to mess with it, you can create a new role. More info here.