Modular architecture

The biggest change in Edit Flow v0.7 is that the entire plugin has been rewritten into a modular architecture. Each feature is a module you can enable or disable. Most modules have a configuration view where, among other things, you can change which post types you want to apply the feature to. No more dealing with code snippets for adding custom statuses to your custom post type. There are also standard UIs for customizing each feature.

One purpose of the modular architecture is to make it much easier for others to contribute new features. It’s super easy to plug a new module into our framework and have it work with existing features. Learn more about contributing code.

Month-by-month calendar with AJAX drag and drop

The calendar now defaults to showing the upcoming six weeks, and you can change this range to a week or up to twelve weeks. Unpublished posts can be dragged from date to date so you can keep track of what’s going to be published when. Click on a post title to see all of the details about the post (including your viewable editorial metadata).

Other improvements

Along with the big changes, we added a lot of polish to each feature, including:

• Editorial metadata can appear in the calendar, story budget, or manage posts screen by marking a term as “viewable”.
• Editorial metadata display in nicely formatted columns if you move its post meta box under the editor.
• Prioritize your custom statuses and editorial metadata with drag-and-drop. You now have full control over what appears in what order. This also affects presentation of this data in the calendar and elsewhere.
• “Draft” and “Pending Review” post statuses can be deleted.
• Notifications have a filter so you can disable auto-subscribing the post author or users who edit the post.
• Fixed the order of execution for saving notifications, so you can auto-subscribe user groups based on post status using a code snippet.
• Improved how the story budget date range works — now you’ll pick a start date and number of days to show.
• Switched to jQuery Datepicker, which has a much friendlier UI, for all date selection.

Credits for this release

Edit Flow is an open source project, and we’re indebted to many people for helping us improve the code and experience. In particular, we’d like to mention:

• Ben Balter, Nick Hamze, and Rinat Khaziev for their code contributions and testing.
• Andrew Witherspoon, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino, and Chelsea Otakan for their design expertise.
• Steve McConnell for extensive testing and usability feedback.
• The Noun Project for an awesome set of free to use icons.
• Automattic for allowing me (Daniel) to work on Edit Flow as a 20%, sometimes 50-80%, project.

Try out Edit Flow v0.7 and let us know what you think. Want to help make the next version even better? Check out our introduction to contributing, and get involved!

The coolest thing about the WordPress community, is that well, it’s a community. Developers don’t just write code in vacuum and send it on its way, but rather are part of an ecosystem of mutual inspiration and informal collaboration.

WP Document Revisions a document management and collaboration plugin for WordPress announced recently that the latest release will automatically detect Edit Flow, if installed, and will pull Edit Flow’s workflow tools into its own interface — cool, huh?

While this is undoubtedly a great pat on the back for Edit Flow and its efforts, the bigger news for the community is that now teams can use Edit Flow’s proven workflow tools in their newsroom with virtually any file format — Word, Adobe, images, anything.

If you want to give it a try, simply download and activate WP Document Revisions and begin working, no additional configuration required if you’ve already got Edit Flow installed.

Basically, if you set a post or a page to a custom post status, the publication timestamp would be set and saved. Upon publication of the piece, the publication date was set to whenever you originally saved the post with a custom post status. Our fix works around some of the limitations of WordPress core on this issue.

WordPress.org user saomay deserves our thanks for their patience in helping track down the issue, and testing the fixes. It was originally reported in the forum.

It’s worth noting that we’re actively working on v0.7. You can follow our discussion on our development blog. We’ll be looking for beta testers, translators, and documentation writers shortly. If you’d like to help out, let us know in the comments.

The most significant improvement is that you can properly bulk edit posts and pages with custom statuses.

For editorial metadata, we’ve added a “Number” metadata type, along with a link to easily clear the field when dealing with date metadata.

Lastly, we’ve added filters for the “Posts I’m Following” widget on the dashboard, and for the posts that appear in the calendar. If you’ve wanted to add custom post types to either of these interfaces, now’s your chance!

Check out our full changes in the changelog. Also, we’ll be moving from our Google Group to a development P2 if you’d like to follow along.

As always, please hit us with feedback, ideas, and questions in the WordPress.org forum.

To increase (or decrease) the number of posts from the default of 10, just add a small code snippet to the functions.php file in your theme. For instance, the following would increase the number of stories shown per category to 20:

add_filter( 'ef_story_budget_query_limit', create_function( '', 'return 20;' ) );

Of course you could split out the create_function call above to actually use a function that you’ve defined elsewhere in your functions.php file, but unless you’re going to have complicated logic to decide how many posts to display, I don’t see the need for anything beyond that one-liner.

Any further tutorials you would like to see on our blog here? There are lots and lots of filters baked into Edit Flow that are just dying to be unlocked by you, our users—let us know in the comments below what you’d like to customize or see in action and we’ll do our best to explain how to use it! And as always, for support questions, please post your question here.

The code sample limits authors to only set ‘Draft’ and ‘Pitch’ statuses, whereas editors (and administrators, by omission) have access to all statuses.

 -1,
	'author' => array( 'draft', 'pitch' )
);

add_filter( 'ef_custom_status_list', 'ef_x_filter_statuses_by_role', 10, 2 );

function ef_x_filter_statuses_by_role( $statuses, $post ) {
	global $role_status_map;

	$role = ef_x_get_user_role();
	if( isset( $role_status_map[$role] ) && $role_status_map[$role] != -1 ) {
		$statuses = ef_x_filter_by_value( $statuses, 'slug', $role_status_map[$role] );
	}

	return $statuses;
}

function ef_x_get_user_role() {
	$user = wp_get_current_user();
	return array_shift( $user->roles );
}

function ef_x_filter_by_value( $array, $property, $value ) {
	$filtered_array = array();
	foreach( (array) $array as $index => $item ) {
		if( isset( $item->$property ) ) {
			if ( ( is_array( $value ) && in_array( $item->$property, $value ) ) || $item->$property == $value ) {
				$filtered_array[$index] = $item;
			}
		}
	}
	return $filtered_array;
}

As always, please hit us with feedback, ideas, and questions in the WordPress.org forum.

Note: Edit Flow v0.6 and above requires WordPress 3.0

Custom Post Type Support

Edit Flow now supports Custom Post Types

It’s a feature many of you have been asking for since Custom Post Types were added in WordPress 3.0. We’re happy to announce that Edit Flow is now custom post type-friendly. You can easily add or remove any Edit Flow feature to your custom post types with a few lines of code. We’ve included some code samples to get you started.

Note: Custom post statuses are now enabled for pages by default as we’ve removed the option from the settings. You can disable them if you’d like with the remove_post_type_support() method.

i18n (Internationalization)

We’ve heard many of our users across the world are interested in translating Edit Flow into their native languages. With this release, we’ve gone through and cleaned up the plugin to make that easy. If you’re interested in providing a translation for Edit Flow, please get in touch and we’ll gladly include it with the plugin. Pig latin is a language too!

Filtering Users and Usergroups

User and Usergroup search and filters

If you have a large list of users, you now how difficult it can be to scroll through and find the exact person you’re looking for. We’ve added filters and search-as-you-type to user and usergroup lists to make that a little easier.

Email Queueing

Emails sent by Edit Flow are now optimized to use queueing for improved performance (and to avoid being flagged as spam).

Bug Fixes

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs:

• Users without JavaScript no longer see the status dropdown
• Users with JavaScript no longer see the respond button for editorial comments
• Contributors should not have the ability to publish through Quick Edit
• Proper i18n support (Thanks Beto Frega and others)
• Editorial Comments issue in IE (Thanks asecondwill and James Skaggs)
• Always email admin feature was not working (Thanks nicomollet)
• Notifications for scheduled posts did not include links (Thanks erikajurney)

For the full list of changes in this release, view the changelog. If you run into issues, the best place to go for help is the WordPress.org Support Forum.

As of v0.6, Edit Flow hooks into ‘transition_post_status’ to add an email notification when the post status changes. To disable these email notifications, all you need to do is remove the hook.