Workflows in CMS

Several times a day, your inbox/news-feed app is bombarded with several articles that are trying to catch your attention. However, making these articles requires preparation, research, writing, proof reading and fact checking before it ends up in your feed.

If you are working in a publishing house, you have teams working on contents, and main editors who are checking and reviewing the submitted content. Bringing organization to this intellectual soup and automating the publishing process is relatively not a straight forward mission. Enter workflows!

Taking a closer look

Currently, workflows in CMSs has evolved significantly, that it started automating some processes that could be cumbersome to content and main editors. One of the most important factors of workflow in CMS in general is streamline the publishing process and make it as smooth as possible, and it is done through specifying stages (same as you would specify it verbally or in a written rule book), which we could summarize it in the following simplified diagram.

Figure 1 Simplified overview of publishing process

However, you probably already know that there is way more into the process than what this diagram shows (whether in newspapers publishing or scientific publishing process). For instance, in scientific papers (and probably in some newspapers) the publication process might have the following flow:

Figure 2 Simplified overview of possible newspapers publishing process

A triage process is where a main editor (or multiple of them) starts considering the which article has the higher priority to go through the publication process. Of course, there is more into the process than just simply these 4 steps which are discussed in detail here.

A workflow in a CMS shouldn’t only handle the reviewing and publishing process, but it has to automate other processes, such as publishing to social media publication channels for example. Say you would like to create a market campaign for certain category of posts, if the CMS you are using allows it, you can simply define a workflow similar to the one below:

Figure 2 Simplified overview of possible newspapers publishing process with social media automation

Workflow is one of the essential components of a CMS, without it a CMS would be incomplete. Surely, we are going to revisit this topic again to shed more light on some areas of the workflow itself in another blog post.

References

• https://www.woodwing.com/en/blog/editorial-workflow-system-your-survival-factor-not-a-whim#digitalasset3
• https://www.roxen.com/news/editorial-systems-for-newspapers-a-system-solution-model/bbbojl!51_0/
• https://asapbio.org/digital-age
• https://www.enginess.io/insights/using-cms-workflow-will-make-organization-efficient