In a recent post I mentioned that one thing I would love to see developed as part of the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition would be some enterprise level workflow tools. WordPress is a great system for users but we keep coming back to the question of whether it is a true CMS. This is partly because it doesn’t work in the same way as traditional CMSs, which is good, but also because it really does have some features missing.

These aren’t so much things that I personally want (my blog is single author), just something I would think would benefit WordPress. In the real world I work in financial services, a sphere in which companies must have particularly strict controls on the content they make available to the public, so how you work with draft content, live content, soon-to-be-live content, changes to content, and the interaction between various different types of content is very important.

As well as being involved in the rules surrounding communicating with the public I am also part of a company that is large enough to use a traditional CMS.

Imagine a company with up to ten customer facing functions all of whom are making changes to a website on a regular basis and require approval from the brand manager. I don’t think I would like to use WordPress for that out of the box.

What I have in mind certainly won’t transform WordPress but it will make it that little bit more controllable. These are the key workflow options that I think are missing right now.

The first issue is that once you publish something any changes you make are saved directly to the live site. This shouldn’t be the case. Changes should be saved to a new unpublished draft version which can be previewed independently and which doesn’t go live until you make that choice.

Of course, with potentially several drafts floating about it is important to be able to specify to the editor which draft it is you are putting forward for publication.

Finally, there should be a simple way to browse all of this content in real time. By switching the front-end site to draft mode where the content which gets displayed is the most recent draft of each item, with clear methods of identifying whether what you are viewing is live content, most recent draft content, or draft content submitted for approval.

The complication with this last point is in interfacing the draft mode with themes and other plugins so that post lists, menus, etc all reflect the draft mode.

A nice to have, but not so important would be the option to view the live site on any past date so the system could be used for audit purposes.

These points might not seem very much and perhaps on their own they aren’t, but they provide a few options for control which would be essential for most commercial use where the author doesn’t have the authority to publish, and more importantly – change, immediately and could help move WordPress into new markets.