Admin Workflow Request

In lots of CMS's there is a workflow tool that allows you to setup admins so that you have an editor that creates content but cannot publish but can set a document to request approval and an admin that gets notified of the editor's request and can login and publish the document.

In MODX this basic ability is missing. I have been told that of course it is possible to set it up this way. I have looked into Form Customization and have seen how easy it is to delete the publish checkbox from a usergroup. But that is not enough.

Is there anyone thought that knows of a plugin or best way to accomplish this. The client feels that since other CMS's offer this out of the box that it is a shame to pay for extra development for this feature.

Maybe someone has some insights?

Just create a user group that doesn't have access to publish documents and install ResourceWatcher extra and have it send you an email every time a new resource is created, it can get a little annoying but it works.

Good Luck.

That is similar to what I did. I created a user group called 'Editor', customized the form so that the publish checkbox does not show up, then I created a TV as a radio button that gives the admin the ability to request approval. Then I created a hook for resourceWatcher that does the following
1) whenever a resource is updated, it checks if the user belongs to the Editor user group, then it checks this approval request TV. If the approval request value is yes, then it sends the email to the super admin.

Thanks for your response!

What about rights ?

I'm pretty sure you can prevent users to publish/create/whatever resources.

Anyway, having a function to send a "publication request" would make a nice feature request for Resource Watcher

yes you can prevent them from publishing with ACLs, but the option still remains there to be seen on the manager page. The only way to also hide this option is to make a custom form. I chose to just hide it.

Ok, I did make for this usergroup their own Access Policy to turn off the ability to duplicate resources. The problem that I found was that the user here could get around the publication limitation when they duplicated a resource. When they duplicated they could say "Preserve Published Status" and then their new document would already be published. With the new access policy this has been eliminated.

I wrote about my experience here http://www.bdcreative-design.com/blog/my-solution-for-a-resource-approval-workflow-using-modx.html

Awesome thanks for sharing.

I started work on an Extra for this quite a while ago, but got bogged down in other work. It looks like sonicpunk's solution is very good.

Just to mention an alternative, you can make the caption of a TV a button with an onClick() JavaScript event (see the Notify extra), so the button could say "Submit for Approval" and the JS could fire an Ajax request to a page that sends the email (and maybe changes the value of the TV from 'draft' to 'pending,' later to be changed to 'published' a la WordPress).

And Romain, if you're tuned in here, changing the name of your extra to ResourceWatcher (instead of 'Resource Watcher') would make it more standard and solve a small problem of mine, though it's not a big deal.