Linked Workflow example

If you have more than one environment (eg “Staging" & “Production”) where you would need to promote content from one environment to another, using a linked Workflow would be the best fit.

Step 1: Workflow Setup

Assuming you have permission to create Workflows, navigate to "Settings" => "Workflows" and select “Add Workflow”

Provide a relevant title, in this case, we will use “Linked”.
Toggle “Linked Environments” to be active.
Add more than one environment, in this case, we will add “Staging” & “Production”.
Select “Add Status” and provide a value. In this case, we will add two statuses (in addition to “Publish” which is a required, non-editable status), namely “Draft” and “Review” for Staging only.
Select “Next”

Step 2: Permissions

Assuming you have permission to update permission groups and you have more than one permission group, you should be able to assign which permission groups have access to which statuses.

Select which permission group should be able to set statuses for each environment
Select “Next”

Step 3: Associate Schemas

Different types of content sometimes need to have different approval flows. For example, you might want to create a “Legal” Workflow and assign it to sensitive copy such as “Terms and Conditions" or "Privacy Policy”. For this example, we will keep it simple and associate our Workflow with all of our schemas.

Assuming you have permission to update schemas you should be able to assign your Workflow to one or more schemas.

Select which schemas you would want to associate with your Workflow
Select “Save”
Select “Close”

Workflows in Actions

Congratulations 🎉 You have successfully created your first custom Workflow. Now that we have created a Workflow and linked it to at least one schema, let’s take a quick look at how we can use our Workflow.

Assuming you have permission to create or edit content, navigate to “Content” and select to view content for the schema you have linked to your Workflow.

You will notice a new column called “Status” indicating the Workflow status your content is currently in. If you have added a Workflow to a schema with existing data, you will notice that the status will be empty.

Let’s create a new entry and save it in “Draft” status.

Select “New Entry” and complete all the relevant fields for your entry. You will note that the default value for “Status” should reflect the first status of your Workflow for the given environment.

"Save" your entry and close the content editor. You should now see the new entry with the status you have selected.

Publishing Content

Once we have made all of our copy changes and we are ready to publish our content, we can go ahead and update our status to Publish and "Save"

For a "Linked" Workflow, you will have the option to promote your content to any of the next environments for your Workflow in relation to your currently selected environment. (If your selected environment is the same as the last environment in your Workflow, you will not see the option to promote your content, it will only be saved to your selected environment since the content resides in your final environment for your Workflow)

Once you have promoted your content, you can switch to the relevant environment to find that your content has been successfully promoted.

Conclusion

You have just published content using Workflows! As you can see Workflows is a powerful tool that can be used by individuals or teams to keep track of content statuses, transition content between statuses and easily publish content to relevant environments.