How to set up Workflows in Wagtail

Hey everyone, Megan here. We're going to be talking about Wagtail workflows this week. So when it comes to mistakes and content, the internet is pretty forgiving when it comes to things. like typos, but they might be a little less forgiving when it comes to factual errors. Or if you're in an industry like medicine or law. Where having correct content is very important, then Wagtail workflows are a great tool for making sure that your content has the quality it needs before it gets published. So let's take a look here. This is an example here of the Wagtail Bakery, and you'll see that on this dashboard There's different categories for this user.

So it notes that you know your pages and snippets are in a workflow or awaiting your review. What that means is that these different pieces of content have been submitted to a moderator or a higher level user to be reviewed before they get published and sent out the door. And so this can be a very useful way to set up things like legal review or even just common editing tasks like copy editing or sending your content up to your your managing editor or your executive editor, like at your publication. So if you're if you work at a magazine or a newspaper, that could also be particularly useful for you.

So how do you use them? Well let's go over here to our settings area And click into settings. And you'll notice that there are two areas related to workflows. One is workflow tests and one is workflows itself. And in order to use workflows, you need to have at least one workflow task set. So let's have a closer look at that. Alright, so by default, Wagtail comes with one workflow task already set up, and that is moderator approval here. But if you click into our demo here, you can see that we can add also a specific user approval task. Like so if you wanted a specific user to approve things. And you can also add a new task that assigns privileges to another group.

So if you like had a group for legal review or health review or anything you can think of along those lines, you can create a task. task related to that. And so these tasks can definitely be customized by your developer using the code underneath Wagtail. I'll include some documentation on how they can do that for you. So that's It pretty much as long as you have groups of users categorized together, you can create tasks related to them. So let's go. So we already have one workflow task set up, which is great. We'll just use this one for a demo. And let's go ahead back into settings and we'll head over to workflows here, where we already have a moderator's approval workflow set up.

But let's say I wanted a specific workflow for the blog on this demo in particular. So let's go ahead and add a new workflow here. And we're gonna give it a name. We're gonna call it blog editor approval. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a task. And since we already have that task that exists, you can create a new one right here if you really want to, but let's go ahead and use the existing task that we have here in the moderator's approval. It's good to reuse some things. And then down here you can do a few different things with your workflow task. You can assign that workflow task to specific pages

within your site, and you can also assign it to different snippets within your site. And snippets are kind of small reusable pieces of code that appear all across your website. It's very commonly used for things like navigation menus or uh authors in blogs, for example. So right here like this person uh snippet here is the one that's being used in this demo for blog authors and article authors. So we could definitely assign a review step to the snippet as well so that somebody can double check that we're spelling everybody's name right or something like that. As somebody whose name gets misspelled quite a bit, I would appreciate that level review. Just saying.

Anyway, so let's go ahead and we're gonna pick uh the pages that we want to apply. I'm gonna dig in a bit here and go ahead and pick the high-level blog page here. And so one thing that's important to know is that if you pick a parent page, Within your page tree structure, which is a very common thing for a blog page to also have several different individual blogs underneath it. It will apply to every page underneath that parent page. So every single blog that is created will have this workflow applied to it from now on. So let's go ahead and

create this task. And you'll see that right now it applies to seven pages, and those are the seven blog articles that appear in this demo. And it shows that it's not applied to any snippets currently. Which is great. That's exactly what we want. So now every time somebody creates a new blog, they will have the option to submit it to moderator review. So let's take a look real quick about how that looks from the blog side of things. So if we go to our blog And we create a brand new page here. I'm just gonna do something like

birds are amazing here uh because you know we love wagtails around here and just going to go through the motions of putting together uh an image here. I don't think we have any bird pictures in this. I like this waterfall picture though, so why don't we go ahead and do that And we'll just do some testing type text here. Testing, testing, testing. Um, and maybe something like birds are the bestest. just to keep going with that. And then we also will need a quick little

body here. So birds are the greatest. We'll continue with the theme here. Just gonna keep going on that. And that has nothing to do with the fact that the the Eagles won the Super Bowl, by the way. Just pointing that out for no reason whatsoever. I might be a fan, but anyway. We'll go ahead and choose the person who's gonna be the editor, who's gonna be the author here. And let's go ahead and preview this, just make sure everything is looking okay Yes, this is looking like a good little test article here. Awesome. And so when you save the draft here.

And like prepare to publish, you'll notice right here that there's now a step that says submit to blog editor approval. And that's our new workflow. And so in this demo, we did not set it up so that we would remove the publish option, but that can certainly be something that you can set up in your workflows if you really wanted to. Also I'm logged in as an admin user, so I have all the power right now. So it doesn't take any steps away from me. I can use anything I want. But if I wanted to make it so that my blog users could only submit to blog editor approval, I could do that. I have the power to do that. There's honestly a lot of great ways that you can customize workflows and make sure that they're set up the way that you want.

So if I click this here and submit to blog editor approval, so you know it's been submitted for moderation, and if we go back here, you'll see now that You can see that Birds Are Amazing is in our workflow here, and it's also now a part of the review queue So that is how workflows work. I hope this inspires you to go try some for yourself. I will definitely include some links down in the video description on how to to set them up and how you can collaborate with a developer to make them work the way you want to. If you enjoyed this video, if you want to learn more about Wagtail, please, please, please. Sign up for our newsletter. I write that one too. Has a lot of great tips and tricks in it, and you will learn a lot.