Hey Drupal developers and site administrators! Ever spend your time handling things like block placement and microsite deployments at the request of your content editors?

Hey content editors and managers! Ever wish you could just do this stuff without relying on your developers and administrators--or becoming a de facto site administrator yourself?

This one's for you.

Three of our modules from 2011--co-sponsored by Energy.gov--empower content editors with greater independence and more effective execution tools.

As Roger pointed out in his Energy.gov case study, State Machine served as the basis for creating an extendable and exportable workflow. In this post, I'll talk about the inner workings of State Machine, it's included counterpart module, State Flow, and how to take advantage of the API to build your own custom workflow.

What is a State Machine?

Introduction

The Need

Our clients and other Drupal site administrators would like to use the Workflow module to schedule transition states in their publishing workflow.

The Problem

Currently, within the Workflow module a node cannot be assigned a scheduled state change upon node creation. A node must be saved first, then edited a second time by the user.

After reading this comment in the Workflow module issue queue: http://drupal.org/node/189572#comment-704334 I decided to try to add a little more automation to the process of creating a node and adding a scheduled state change.

In this Post

You'll learn how to create a publishing workflow for your website, and how to improve the process of scheduling a transition change during node creation.

Let's begin.

Note: This demonstration is build on Drupal 6. The process outlined below may be adapted for Drupal 5 install.