Modx programer need to develop a new content publishing module

Start time - ASAP
Job duration - Completed by June 8
Budget - $1,500
Payment terms - PayPal or other agreed methods

Scope of work -
This project is to extend MODx’s content status to support two more options ("Test" and "Approved") and also to support additional publishing options.

1) Modify MODx roles and permissions to support additional content publishing module and new publishing procedures.
2) Existing MODx page management module will be modified to support additional statuses to support new publishing workflow.
• Test – All new and modified content pages will be set to this status until a tester has validated all new and modified pages.
• Approved – This status is used once new or modified content page has been validated by a tester.
3) New MODx module will be created to allow for page and assets to be replicated to user selected servers (test, stage, public).
• Push to other Servers – Once the content page and assets have been approved, admin will have the ability to push page and assets to other servers (testing, staging or public). List of servers will be configured through a module admin interface.
• Default status for new pages will be “Not Published”. Existing pages that have been modified will take on existing status.

Please PM for any additional questions.

That seems on the surface to be a rather aggressive schedule for a really key feature. Would love to see this developed and released to the community.

You didn’t mention, but I would assume Evo/096x, which version of MODx this should support.

A few questions come to mind when looking at this:

1) If a page is published, then it is modified, do you want an unmodified version to stay published while the modified document goes through testing and approval? I’m a little confused by your description of the statuses. Right now there is "Unpublished" and "Published", and you want to add "Test" and "Approved". Are you looking for a document to have 4 possible publishing states, or are you looking for two separate settings, ie. the document can be Unpublished/Published AND it can be flagged Test/Approved as well?

2) Do you want all of the core snippets, plugins and modules to be modified to work with this new permission structure? Just some specific ones? Any custom ones or non-core resources/snippets from the repository?

3) Pushing page assets to another server.. I would want a little more information on how this might happen. Would this module need to figure out what assets are used in a document? (This can get very tricky, for example if you use a snippet to include assets dynamically.)

The current site is built on MODx 0.9.6.2 rev 4077

The idea for this module is to support multiple server environment (testing and live). Content creators will only use the test server to create/modify pages and upload any related assets to the test server.

If a published page is being modified the original version stays on the live server until the modified document goes through the testing process and is pushed out to the live server replacing the original.

My original thought was to add the two statuses to the current document status structure so a document would have one of four statuses. However netProphET you raise a great point a separate flagging system makes more sense. It seems less intrusive and it would not be dependent on the current document publishing process.

The new permission structure need’s to only support the new module.

Since my post yesterday I have learned that MODx does not manage assets. So I will have to defer to a developer on how this could be best achieved.

I hope this clarifies things a bit thanks netProphET for your great questions...