Editorial workflow
Stages that gate publishing. Define them per workspace, mark which may publish, and a page cannot go live until it reaches one - and editing an approved page sends it back to the start.
A workspace can require pages to travel through stages before they may go live. It is off until you turn it on, and once on it is enforced in the publish path itself rather than by convention.
Stages
Stages are defined per workspace, in its settings. Each one carries:
- a name - "Draft", "In review", "Approved", whatever your team already says out loud
- an order, which decides the sequence and, importantly, which stage is the first one
- an optional colour, so the state is legible at a glance
- allowsPublish - the only flag that changes behaviour
A page shows its current stage in the editor, and moving it between stages is a page action.
What the flag actually does
With the workflow enabled and at least one stage defined, publishing checks the page's stage. If that stage does not allow publishing, the attempt is refused:
This page must reach an approved stage before it can be publishedA page that has never been given a stage counts as being in the first stage - the one with the lowest order - so a new page cannot slip past the gate by simply having no stage at all.
Several stages can allow publishing. "Approved" and "Hotfix" can both be terminal if that is how your team works; the flag is per stage, not a single privileged one.
The part that surprises people
Editing an approved page sends it back to the first stage.
If a page sits in a stage that allows publishing and someone changes its content, cmssy moves it back to the initial stage automatically. The approval was for the words that were reviewed, not for the page as a container - so a change after approval means the approval no longer covers what is there.
This applies to a draft save and to a surgical block patch alike, which means an agent editing through the MCP server cannot quietly retain an approval either.
Worth telling your team once, because the first time it happens it reads as the CMS forgetting something. It is the opposite: it is the CMS refusing to let a review go stale without anyone noticing.
Turning it off
A workflow that is disabled, or enabled with no stages, gates nothing - publishing behaves as if the feature did not exist. That is the honest fallback: an empty workflow should not lock a workspace out of its own content.
Next steps
- Pages - drafts, publishing and what "modified" means.
- Comments and tasks - the review that happens before a stage moves.
- Members and roles - who may move a page and who may publish it.